Lan isnt working win 7 64bit

My motherboard is a MSI 785GM-E51, I have a phenom x4 955 as the cpu, 4 gb of corsair c8 memory, windows 7 ultimate 64 bit and a gtx 470 for starters. Since about a year ago my onboard lan ceased working, Not sure the cause, I tried to fix it to no avail, so I bought a cheap 5 dollar ( on sale ) pcie ethernet card and well that did the trick, i scrapped the onboard lan and went with the pcie one. Yesterday I decided it was time to buy a sound card, however, I needed a pcie slot, so I went ahead and uninstalled my pcie card and took it out, tried to reinstall and fix my onboard but nothing worked. Now my pcie card wont even be recogniozed in the device manager, well it will but there is the exlamation mark next to it just like my onboard. The error message for both when i double click them is

This device is not configured correctly. (Code 1)

The parameter is incorrect.


To find a driver for this device, click Update Driver.

I tried and tried I'v downloaded tons of drivers and nothing works, Iv tried updating my bios, looking in the bios for any disabling onboard lan and everything seems to be working...in theory. Just cant get this thing to work, at the moment I have it connected to wireless through a usb adapter (lucky me for my neghbors unprotected wireless)
And ideas? A few people have mentioned leaving the comp unplugged for an hour, taking the ram out and leaving it out for an hour, clearing the cmos, doing a winsock reset, manually installing the driver, nothing seems to be working. I don't believe it is necessarily the driver or anything, I believe theres something that happened that is preventing the drivers to install correctly, as the old pcie card that was working last night is no longer working once i reinstalled it.
 

someone19

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Jan 16, 2011
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Did you remove the device from device manager before you shut down the computer to remove the card the first time??? I've seen windows not cleanly remove all the entries for a driver when the hardware went missing, then when it is reinstalled, those ghost entries prevented a successful install of the new drivers.

In the win98 through XP days I would boot into safe mode and go into the device manager and delete any duplicate entries, reboot and the card would be automatically detected and drivers installed.

I've had onboard lan burned out by voltage spikes on the network, typically causes by an electrical storm, while addon cards survived. I think when they install LAN on a motherboard that it doesn't have the same level of protection, its just connected to the silicon more directly and is more fragile.

Try the safe mode trick, don't remove anything quite yet however, if you remove items without knowing what they are you risk your system. I might just boot into safe mode then reboot without even looking at device manager, sometimes that would be enough to 'clean up' what's needed.
 
I had uninstalled it in device manager then i took the card out after I shut it down, tried to get my onboard to work. The onboard cant be burnt out because when the drivers are not installed or anything, when i uninstall the generic drivers windows provides the light is green in the back when I have the cable plugged in, once windows auto installs drivers it goes dark. Not sure as to what would cause this, some more information that I thought about was nothing seems to be installing correctly really, my video card installed fine last month, but my wireless card only works in 1 specific port, when I try to move it to a different one it installs unsuccessfully, there seems to be a problem with my internet im thinking something in the registry maybe preventing anything I install to function correctly, but everything that is already installed functions fine.