Last January I set up a new PC for a family. This was their first machine so they nothing. I installed ZoneAlarm, AVG, Mozilla, OpenOffice and maybe a couple of other helpful things. I heard from them again a couple of days ago. Seems their computer had stopped working. It would boot but they couldn't access anything on the internet. oh boy, I thought.

I went over prepared for the worst, SpyBot, ZoneAlarm, AVG, Greg's reset TCP/IP instructions... Yep, machine boots, no internet access. None. Very strange. SpyBot came up almost empty. Just a few registry entries and a bunch of cookies. Nothing sinister. Ok, new version of AVG. 1 worm. Fixed that. Still no internet access. Weird. Check, yep SP2 is installed. Reset TCP/IP. Internet access for a few seconds and then nothing. Hmmmm, took a close look at ZoneAlarm's deny list. "Generic Windows Driver" (or somesuch) hmmmmm. Changed it to question. Tried accessing a web site. ZoneAlarm immediately popped up with Windows Generic Driver. Ah, ha!

It seems that what happened was that this driver was changed by the install of SP2. So when an internet request was made, eg. checking mail, ZoneAlarm presented a dialog box and asked if it was ok for thi driver to access the internet. Since they didn't know what it was, they said 'no'. And there you have it. They felt a little silly, but I assured them, since they didn't know, that was the right answer.

Their machine is once again fully functional. Felt good to give them their machine back as though nothing had happened.