[grad_girl_1]

Cannot connect to the internet on the Mac, so went to the Network settings area and am getting a lot of weirdness:

(1) The Locations: field is blank, and I can't set it to anything. If I hit the scroll bar next to it, I see New Location.. and Edit Location..., but if I select either of these nothing happens.

(2) None of the tabs on the lower area of the screen have any content whatsoever. For instance, it is completely blank when I press TCP/IP, AppleTalk, PPP, Modem, etc. No text, no graphics, no buttons.

About 10 days ago this machine wouldn't even start up (got stuck on the gray apple screen with the spinner, so we eventually reinstalled the entire OS since absolutely nothing else would work).

Any ideas?

[Cold Warrior]

Boot from your OS X install/restore disc and run Disk Utility's 'repair disk' function to test your hard drive for errors or damage and to repair what it can. Then run the hardware test from your OS X restore disc by inserting it and holding down d at startup.

I moved this to networking due to all the issues being with networking. The OP may find larger issues after diagnostics.

[dimmer]

That sounds like your Mac has for some unknown reason blown all of it's network ports away: if it were a single missing item, I'd think hardware, but software seems more likely (I'm not 100% sure on this: I don't know how much of a modern Mac uses a chipset for all of their IO).

Since you just reinstalled the OS I guess that may have gone wrong: it can't hurt to try it again (fresh install, if the hardware sees your DVD/CD drive of course).

[grad_girl_1]

Good call on moving the post to the Networking forum.

Tried the disk repair, but it didn't work (when I re-ran 'Verify disk' after it had repaired itself, the same problem showed up). Prior to the OS reinstall, we had a similar problem-- the disk had issues, the repair appeared to fix them, but when we re-verified the disk the exact same errors reappeared. This time around there are fewer (and different) errors, but the repair still appears to do nothing.

Unfortunately we don't seem to have an OS X restore disk. We tried rebooting after the disk repair but still have the same problem. We hope to avoid reinstalling the OS again. I should note that the internet worked just fine after the first reinstall.

Any other thoughts?

[Cold Warrior]

What sort of disk errors? If your drive is damaged, repairing may not fully work, and its deeper damage will continually re-corrupt everything.

Post the disk error(s) if you can and we may be able to tell you more.

[grad_girl_1]

The disk error is "invalid key length".

Cold Warrior, are you really in Moscow? What's the temp there? It's -1F here, do we have you beat???

[Cold Warrior]

That could be serious. Check out some other threads I found from Googling your error:
Invalid Key Length Disk Error Message - Google

You may want to consider 3rd-party repair utilities and/or replacing the hard drive. See this thread on our boards for more: http://forums.macnn.com/90/mac-os-x/...utility-error/

What sort of Mac do you have?

[Cold Warrior]

BTW - no, not in Moscow. Been there though, some years before the Bear began its resurgence.