Ok I went to the Apple Genius Bar and booted up by Firewire with the Genius Drive, all of my hardware worked. When we tried booting from the hard drive I was unable to connect either by ethernet or Airport. The ip's were self-assigned and the Wireless indicator was marked by an exclamation point on the menu bar. I should mention that my ethernet worked fine connected to my home network but could not get an Internet connection (this should have been a big clue).
Although I had already re-installed Snow Leopard (and combo 10.6.2), the Genius was worried that not all of the files were re-installed because I did not do a clean install. So I went home and booted off of my Snow Leopard Install Disk, erased my MBP hard drive and reinstalled SL.
Internet connection worked fine until I installed the combo update. Then the same problem developed. Frustrated I again searched the Internet for any clues and I ran across an interesting solution focusing on the SL firewall.
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=384947&page=5
It instructed to use Terminal to flush ipfw cache. I am not a Terminal or Unix expert in any way but since I am always backed up I wasn't really concerned. So I tried it and it worked! But be careful as Terminal commands are not for the faint of heart and I was desperate.
I do not want to be without a firewall so instead of using the SL user interface, am trying Door Stop X on a trial basis. At first when I turned it on I again ran into problems, but after some research I configured it to allow an Internet connection.
I am not sure why the SL firewall overtime shut me down because I did not change anything (although I understand some software brings along its own firewall changes). It is all working fine now.
Message was edited by: Robert Deleeuw
Message was edited by: Robert Deleeuw
Message was edited by: Robert Deleeuw