Winsock is real fundamental part of all windows versions since windows 95, back then on win 95 it were like a module that could be added and updated... now it's an integral part of the OS which hasn't gone through any evolvement the last couple of years. It's a fragile piece of software, that relies heavily on a registry entries. It does not do sanity checks and doesn't use default values, and when it screws up -- you're toast.
Without any network connection, I can't dump my ~40Gb of MP3's and ~3Gb of digital photos to another machine... and it's a little too much to burn to CDs, If I do a recovery installation I might loose other data, stored in the registry... and have to re-install programs. fark.