Possible virus, strange symptoms

[midnightfire]

my friend is having me try to fix a laptop for a family member. the laptop cannot connect to the internet (either through a hardline or wifi) and is giving a 'no sound hardware' error. the laptop is an hp and it's running windows vista home premium. i've noticed that i can't diagnose issues with the connections because it tells me that the diagnostic policy service isn't running because svchost.exe isn't running. i tried starting the service, but i get an error telling me that access is denied, even though the account is administrator. i tried to run svchost.exe, but it doesn't do anything, even when ran as administrator. we thought there might be some driver issues causing the 'no sound hardware' problem and not being able to connect to the internet, but after the svchost and connection diagnostic thing, i'm leaning towards a virus. if anyone has any insight to this, it would be greatly appreciated.

[Dr Jay]

Hello, and welcome to Computer Hope.

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