Perplexing XPSP2 internet connection problem

aidan_walsh

For the past two days I have been unable to get an internet connection in Windows XP Pro SP2. At first I thought that it was just Eircom acting up, but when I realised that I could always connect straight through in Linux (how I'm getting to you now, while XP doesn't seem to be letting me on) I thought that this was somewhat unusual. Its been working fine up until about Saturday. I've had SP2 installed since the first release, and its worked fine since then.

I connect using the Home Starter pack from Eircom, and the Ethernet connection.

So I ran my virus scanner, Ad-Aware and SpyBot over it and all turned up negative. I tried using System Restore to roll back to points created last Thursday, Monday and Friday week ago respectively, but since all failed to restore properly, I quickly gave up on that idea.

But here's the odd bit, I noticed tonight that when I go to check my Network Settings, it tells me that the cable has been disconnected. But its not. I swapped it into the other Ethernet port (an integrated 3Com 3C920B-EMB Integrated Fast Ethernet Adapter, the default its been sitting in is an NVIDIA nForce MCP Networking Adapter). And since I am using the same machine to type this up using a Fedora Core 2 installation, I am highly doubtful that its a hardware problem.

The only thing that I can think I have installed recently was Sun's Java Desktop System (based on SuSE 8), but that can't be the cause, as the very reason I finally got around to that was because the connection wsn't working on Sunday!

Can anyone think of any reason as to why its just given up the ghost?

jessy

Are your AntiVirus and Spyware up to date?
Did you check your network settings? (just make sure network connection isint disabled)
Is windows Firewall Disabled? (its worth disabling it just to see if that is the problem)

aidan_walsh

Both were only updated last week, my network settings are unchanged and Windows Firewall is disabled in favour of Sygate Personal Firewall.

I guess I should elaborate on the seeming problem with the Ethernet adapters. When its plugged into one adapter, the unplugged ones are listed as being connected, whereas the one the cable is sitting in tells me that the cable is unplugged. When I swap it over, the situation reverses, the one originally telling me it was unconnected now goes to connected, and vice versa. I'd have put this down to a driver problem had both adapters not come from different manufacturers and running on different drivers...

deevey

Ok that a bit of a wierd one,

if you do an ipconfig what adaptor seems to get an IP address from the router or are you getting one at all ?

Have you tried disabling one of the adaptors fully ? If one is onboard maybe try disabling it in bios perhaps.

SP2 does seem to have some nasty quirks sometimes espessially if it was the autoupdate flavour as oppossed to the 250meg full blown install.

If the firewall is causing issues make sure its not only disabled fully on the lan and security centre but also in "services" tab to acces this

start > run > msconfig > click on the services tab and uncheck the firewall or security centre from here.

I'd also try unchecking all options in here and possibly temorarily uninstall sygate... and reinstall when everything is happy again.

my 2 cents

Steve

aidan_walsh

Well, both adapters are integrated into the motherboard. It was the 250Meg standalone download of SP2 (didn't fancy having to redownload it if I ever had to reformat and reinstall).

I'll try disabling the firewall, thats starting to sound likely now alright as to explaining why traffic won't get through, but less so for the connected\disconnected quirkes... Going to have to wait until tonight before I can though...

aidan_walsh

Well, it turns out that my copy of Sygate got a little over zealous. Once I disabled the service I could get back online. Thing is, when I re-ran everything over the machice my anti-virus caught a trojan, and Spybot picked up 108 sudden new entries... So I've reverted back to ZoneAlarm for the time being, until I have a proper trawl of the forums here for another package that I can use instead.

Thanks to everyone who helped!