> I'm back to the functional internet access now, and it will stay up. I still have the other two problems, though.

Well, as a workaround (not really a solution, but a step up from where you are), I'd suggest that you set winipcfg to run automatically at startup to prevent you from having to do it manually.

It strikes me as odd that Windows won't let you delete that file. I would recommend deleting it from DOS, then, if you're sure you want to delete it - bear in mind that you may have to remove some attributes from it before you can get away with that.