it is something not related to the patch if disabling the patch didn't fix it, the next thing i would think is somethign else has replaced the ws2_32.dll file in the system directory, however i'm not sure of any program that would do that (as it is extremely bad practice, for the precise reason that it would break things)
first search your hard drive for any files named ws2_32.dll, you should only see the one in the system directory not any others so useful to check for that, then that one in the system directory should show in the file properties as being by microsoft
in theory literally any dll that winmx uses could have been tampered with by a program and cause that problem, but ws2_32.dll is the most likely one to check (if for no reason than the fact that if it isn't that one then there are a lot of places to look in...)
