I woke up this morning, and when I got to my computer, I had no internet connection. I tried pinging Yahoo.com from a command prompt, and it worked fine. So something was goofy with Windows.
I went into the kind of panic an addict might go into when faced with going cold turkey. I won't say I broke into a cold sweat, but it was close.
Finally, I tried shutting down ZoneAlarm. And what do you know? I got my internet back.
So I Googled the problem. And it turns out that people all over were experiencing the same thing. And reacting in much the same way, which made me feel a little less like a geek.
Turns out that Microsoft issued a security download that kills the internet connections of anyone using ZoneAlarm on Windows XP. Here's a press release from ZoneAlarm, but there were tons of articles online about it.
Microsoft is evil. That is all.
Posted by Shigosei (Member # 3831) on :
I had the same thing, and I noticed that the internet broke right after the update. I've had annoyances with Zone Alarm before, so I shut it down, and everything worked just fine.
Interesting that it was a widespread thing, not something unique to my computer.
Posted by Nighthawk (Member # 4176) on :
quote:Microsoft Update KB951748 is known to cause loss of internet access for ZoneAlarm users...
quote:Recommended Actions -
Download and install the latest versions...
Uh...
*EDIT* Yeah, I see the text further down. I'm always hesitant to uninstall a "hot fix" myself.
Posted by lobo (Member # 1761) on :