Comments | mr_orgue: Grah, computer!

mr_orgue

Grah, computer!

Jul 11, 2008 08:25

Help! Computer people ( Read more... )

Comments 14

marsden_online July 10 2008, 20:41:36 UTC

I've had similar issues with a mis-configured firewall before. That's the only suggestion I can offer.

mr_orgue July 10 2008, 20:59:03 UTC

That's now on my list of suspects.

tfbretz July 10 2008, 20:42:44 UTC

Chances are it's got everything to do with Windows XP Service Pack 3. It seems to be playing havoc with a whole host of wireless cards and is also not playing nice with ZoneAlarm and a good many third party security utilities.

I recommend Googling for XP SP3 issues and see what comes up that might pertain to your particular equipment. At worst case, you may have to uninstall the SP and reinstall some drivers. That's what we did, after making sure the automatic updates were entirely turned off.

mr_orgue July 10 2008, 20:57:09 UTC

This sounds extremely plausible. I'm running a bunch of 3rd party security stuff - AVG and ZoneAlarm for a start.

Will investigate, cheers!

tfbretz July 10 2008, 21:02:59 UTC

There's a thread on Tangency about it at the moment:

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=403996

(You'll have to be logged in to view it.)

mundens July 10 2008, 22:12:23 UTC

Actually it's not SP3 as such, it's a recent "Critical security update" that fixed a DNS security flaw that's caused the problem. Here's more details :

http://www.informationweek.com/news/security/client/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=208806946

And here's the fix :

http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2221355/check-point-patches-microsoft

Thread 6

bartok July 10 2008, 20:55:18 UTC

To be honest your ISP help desk won't be able to help since it's definitely a configuration problem on your PC. If you're able try a ping-test of the router/modem, and if that is successful then try to ping websites. Basically you want to see if your PC is getting information to/from the router.

mr_orgue July 10 2008, 20:58:38 UTC

Yeah, I didn't think it was ISP-related, was going to call the laptop people and see if they could shed any light. They're 90% useless though.

One diagnostic ran ping tests and didn't have any joy, tho' I haven't done any myself. Theron's blaming XP SP3 and that sounds likely.

Thanks for the suggestions!

argentbear July 10 2008, 22:25:19 UTC

I found that it was zonealarm causing the problem. I had to monkey with the settings a bit until it worked properly.

Hopefully Zonealarm will patch soon so that it works properly.

anarchangel23 July 14 2008, 03:15:34 UTC

Can you remember what you did? Fortunately I guessed Zone Alarm was the problem pretty early on, but I haven't got a good fix yet.

mr_orgue July 14 2008, 03:20:25 UTC

I lowered ZoneAlarm security settings to medium, downloaded the revised version of ZA that is linked to above:
http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2221355/check-point-patches-microsoft

Then restored ZA security settings to High. And i was right as rain after that.

anarchangel23 July 14 2008, 04:19:29 UTC

Ah, cheers, I must have misread the comment with that link, I thought it was a temporary fix.