Author |
Message |
Froggy
| Posted on Tuesday, October 09, 2007 - 07:39 pm: |
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Ok i'll make a long story short, i was away for the weekend at Buelltoberfest and someone played with my computer while i was gone. Nobody will fess up but thats not the issue. My problem is that most programs cannot access the internet anymore, and they include Internet Explorer, Trillian, Aim, Spybot, Nod32. For some reason IE works fine in 64 bit mode but not 32, and some stuff built into windows works fine like stuff for the Vista sidebar and windows update. I look at connection logs of the programs that don't work and they get errors along the line of "cannot open socket". Ive been playing around with this for the last 2 days, reinstalled drivers, reset just about everything i can think of, and even tried popping in another NIC to try and get this fixed. All i can think of is somehow i got a proxy setup on my computer but i don't use one and i don't know how to fix. Any ideas? Thanks Core2Duo E6300 1.86ghz running at 3ghz, 2gb Corsair XMS memory, ATI x1900GT, Asus P5B-Deluxe, 2TB total HDD space, Vista 64 Bit Ultimate OEM legit. |
Coal400
| Posted on Tuesday, October 09, 2007 - 10:00 pm: |
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I have run some tests at work with Vista. Its not yet certified for business use. I'm taking it that this is your home PC? Did you try turning off Defender and testing? You can obviously ping a system on the internet, right? You mention that you are not using a proxy, if you were you could not ping "google.com" directly. I can try to assist you tomorrow - I'm super swamped at work, but am willing to assist you over the phone if you're interested. Send me a PM with your number in a bitmap and a time thats good for you. My knee-jerk on this one is a firewall. I would not be surprised if you have some sort of conflict with Spybot and the native security on your system too. |
Reepicheep
| Posted on Tuesday, October 09, 2007 - 10:03 pm: |
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Are you going through a residential router / wireless access point? It may need to be set up again. |
Brad_buell
| Posted on Wednesday, October 10, 2007 - 01:19 am: |
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System Restore to the day before you left.......??? |
Natexlh1000
| Posted on Wednesday, October 10, 2007 - 08:10 am: |
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Sounds like someone installed some crappy adware or spamware and then uninstalled it. I tried some file-sharing thing after napster went down and it installed something within the tcpip so that I wouldn't be able to connect to the internet without it in place. I had to actually reinstall the spamware in order to connect to the net to download a utility for removing it! try this: http://www.lavasoftusa.com/ and this: http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html |
Staindus
| Posted on Wednesday, October 10, 2007 - 09:11 am: |
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I have nothing nice to say about Vista. I had an issue that I could not resolve involving a wireless bridge setup that sounds very similar to your problem. Maybe this is part of your problem as well. http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=10 |
Cereal
| Posted on Wednesday, October 10, 2007 - 01:02 pm: |
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My first guess would be that you are going through a proxy that is on your network. The admins have ours set up all funky so that some of my port 80 traffic works, but others doesn't. If nothing changed on your computer, look at the network. |
Froggy
| Posted on Wednesday, October 10, 2007 - 03:23 pm: |
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Coal, it is my home PC. It has been working just about perfectly and completely flawless since I installed it in March. I can ping google.com and froggypwns.com fine, as those are the 2 sites I usually try first. I’ll take you up on your phone offer if I can’t get this figured out. And unless it’s some kind of secret firewall I don’t know or don’t see, it wouldn’t be that as all I use is windows firewall and I disabled that already. Reepicheep, I use a plain old Linksys router, but I bypassed it and connected straight into the modem to rule it out, still no dice. Brad_buell, system restore was disabled for some reason Natexlh1000, I was beginning to think that it was spyware or something, I left the computer this morning scanning with 3 month old Spybot and Adaware definitions as they wont update. I will manually update them if needed. My Nod32 antivirus is current till Oct 8th, and I left it scanning too. Staindus, Sorry that you have nothing nice to say, as Vista has been great to me. The link you posted talked about upgrading the router, but I already ruled that out as the issue. Cereal, yea it is looking like some kind of proxy got setup or something on my computer, but I’m not sure how to fix it. My network didn’t change, only my computer did. Thanks for the help so far guys, ill post more when I figure this out. |
Staindus
| Posted on Wednesday, October 10, 2007 - 04:33 pm: |
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Sorry that was just my personal opinion of Vista. I work for a college and administer a Windows domain as well as help people with Linux, OS X, as well as Windows, so I have my reasons. Anyway it sounds like an IPsec problem. You might want to try and disable it to see if that is where the problem lies. It is turned on by default. You can google "Vista IPsec Policy Agent" and find some sites that show how to disable it. You can always turn it back on if thats not it. Happy trouble shooting, and hope you do not take it personally that I dont like windoze. Rob |
Reepicheep
| Posted on Wednesday, October 10, 2007 - 06:26 pm: |
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In internet explorer, try Tools-> Internet Options -> Connections -> Lan settings... anything there? Try automatic setup. Ping uses a different type of packet then a web request, so thats a revealing result. I think somebody probably answered "no" to some Vista security question, and locked something down that needs to be open... |
Froggy
| Posted on Wednesday, October 10, 2007 - 07:02 pm: |
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Staindus, i didn't take it personal, i just get a little pissed because most people diss Vista without ever even seeing or using the OS, kinda like Buell in some ways. I disabled the IPsec and it didn't seem to change anything that i can tell, and my problem still exists. oh well. Reepicheep, i checked that again just now for the hell of it, and auto detect settings is unchecked, but it still acts the same with it checked. I think im just going to end up reformatting, im getting tons of retarded errors now, and my anti virus picked up a few minor trojans. Note to self: Unplug power to the water cooling system before leaving for MB5..... |
Reepicheep
| Posted on Wednesday, October 10, 2007 - 08:08 pm: |
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If you have another machine around, you could pull the drive from that one, mount it as a slave (or use a cheap external usb enclosure), and use *that* intact machines antivirus and antispyware to go hunting and cleaning. I have had pretty good luck that way. |
Lost_in_ohio
| Posted on Wednesday, October 10, 2007 - 09:49 pm: |
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Just sounds like you have a brower hijack in progress. Sounds like someone visited some porn sites and clicked on the wrong button, not that I know cough cough. Reep has a solution that I have used before, successfully. reformatting is the last option. |
Staindus
| Posted on Thursday, October 11, 2007 - 09:01 am: |
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I can relate to that Froggy. I agree with Reepicheep and Lost. Clear out the viruses first, I have also seen Adware and Spyware screw up the IP stack. Also check on the hosts and the lmhosts file to see if they were modified. Here is a cook book of things to try. http://support.gateway.com/s/Checklists/BPC/ck2007 022632.shtml Hope you get this resolved without having to re-install. |
Rasmonis
| Posted on Thursday, October 11, 2007 - 10:21 am: |
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Sux you don't have a restore / backup set up in Vista as I have had great success with both in the past. Vista also has a built-in diagnostic utility you can run if you have the OEM disk during boot up. This too works great. I've been using Vista regularly since last summer (beta) and I like it and have had few issues with it (on older systems and new), I don't get all the MS haters. Name one OS/application suite that is bug-free. I use what works for me like everyone else. |
Lost_in_ohio
| Posted on Thursday, October 11, 2007 - 11:41 am: |
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restore point will not help a browser hijack. You have too remove the files manually. The browser hijack will not let you go to any of the antivirus or spyware sites. That is why you have to boot from another hard drive. |
Xb12rene
| Posted on Thursday, October 11, 2007 - 01:36 pm: |
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After you got everything running again, try Feronics Deep Freeze (click here), to protect your computer in the time you not at home. I use it on my kids computer. Now they can learn how to use a computer (or mess it up) and after a restart everything is back to normal. It helped me to cut the maintenance time to almost 0. Hope that helps Rene |
Reepicheep
| Posted on Thursday, October 11, 2007 - 03:07 pm: |
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I would also strongly recommend (for any Windows system) K9 web protection. It's free for a home user, and will allow you to customize what and how you want to block. Critical for houses with kids, and I like having it on my own machine. Regardless of your position on explicit content, you probably want to know when you are entering the red light district, and when you are on broadway. The software won't block you unless you want it to. A great side effect I have found from it is that their "blacklists" also include a huge number of spyware and malware sites. When I go through the logs, I find dozens of "blocks" on spyware drive by installs. |
Froggy
| Posted on Monday, October 15, 2007 - 09:45 pm: |
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Hey guys, just to let you guys know, i ended up just reformatting. Not sure what happened but it stopped booting. Oh well. I'm all back up and running with a fresh install, and all is well except that i was a moron and i backed up my RAID controller drivers onto the RAID drive. To make it worse, the link on Promise's site is broken. I emailed them and i hope they fix the link soon. Thank you all again for your help, next time i will make a second account with no rights so nothing could possibly go wrong. |
Reepicheep
| Posted on Tuesday, October 16, 2007 - 08:27 am: |
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Thats annoying... Been there done that on the driver thing... so close... but so far... You might try a bootable linux CDRom... it might recognize the raid array and let you get things mounted enough to move the windows drivers to another media. Or just do the driver hunt... cant count how many hours I have spent doing that... |
Froggy
| Posted on Wednesday, October 17, 2007 - 02:55 pm: |
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Hey Reepicheep, I found an old knoppix disk I had, ended up booting to it and reminding myself how much I can't stand Linux. Oh well, after 3 hours of farting around I was able to get it to copy the files to a USB drive, because it wouldn't let me copy to another hard drive or burn to a CD. Then when I got back into windows the USB stick was corrupt, so I had to format it and try again..... In the end, I got it working, and somehow getting everything working with Vista this time was a ton easier than it was when I first installed it back in February. Thank you again |
Signguyxb12
| Posted on Tuesday, October 23, 2007 - 02:52 pm: |
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the reason you cant burn or copy is the permission r set to the highest to keep people from by-passing your security on you Win box by plopping in a live cd.. froggy try a new ubuntu live cd ... or a new Knoppix both will mount the drives and Ubuntu will see the raid(all most positive on the raid)
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Reepicheep
| Posted on Tuesday, October 23, 2007 - 03:54 pm: |
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Wow! Sorry I missed that reply... I don't think the "since last search" function on the board is 100%... thats not the first I have missed... Yeah... unix is a power tool. When it goes well, it goes really well. When it goes badly, it's easy to lop off 3 of 4 limbs before you even start to feel the pain I just downloaed Ubuntu last night. I am considering replacing my Fedora systems with it. I'm getting a bit tired of "simple stuff" showing up with bugs right off the distribution CD's. Easy enough to fix, but it feels like a stupid excercise, and the whole Fedora release is starting to feel a bit... cumbersome... Ubuntu may annoy me in different ways, we will see.. |
Signguyxb12
| Posted on Tuesday, October 23, 2007 - 04:29 pm: |
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do we need a Linux thread... LMAO Just a note ... if you have not tried a new linux distro ( 2+ years ) then you are missing a lot... i.e. the Unbuntu series is plug n play try the live cd and see if it sees everything...then dual boot most people r very shocked I am by no means a computer wiz, but i have got it to a point where i feel comfortable recommending it and assisting others no viruses, no spyware , no headaches froggy they even have an educational distro for schools and stuff http://www.ubuntu.com/ releases http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/710to ur My current project ... geekarrific http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2176025602 905109829 |
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