I got nailed by this one today. If you are a ZoneAlarm user it may already be too late. The Microsoft Security Update for Windows XP (KB951748) will wipe out your network settings. ZoneAlarm hasn’t come out with specific instructions yet. Another site I found says that if you reset your ZoneAlarm protection level from High down to Medium and then remove KB951748 you should be okay (but they don’t say how to remove the update). I just restarted with a previous (good) version of WinXP, which is an option on the Start => Help & Support window.
I had my WinXP set up to automatically accept Microsoft updates, so as soon as I rebooted with the working version from a few days ago, the f’ing update reloaded and knocked my connectivity out again. I now have the update window held captive in Custom Installation mode waiting for me to click on OK. I think I’ll just leave it there until ZoneAlarm can clear this up.
Thanks for posting this. I had no idea what was going on with my network! I figured it was something to do with the firewall, but I didn’t know exactly what, so I just uninstalled the firewall. I’m running behind a firewall on my router anyway. You at least explained the first part of my problem. My network is still losing connectivity, so I have to reboot it every day. Maybe some remnants of Zone Alarm still need to be deleted. Anyway, thanks for the post.
I had the same problem on Wednesday late afternoon. As a last resort, I shut down Zone Alarm temporarily and my connectivity instantly returned.
I turned Zone Alarm back on and immediately lost my connection. At that point, I uninstalled ZA and then reinstalled it again. So far, everything is running good again.
I had completely removed ZA from my machine, so there weren’t any previous settings to retain. In the past, ZA has retained old settings whenever I’ve upgraded to a new rev. In my case, it was probably good to start completely over. My program control window looks a whole lot less cluttered.