Member Avatar for vegeoku

Well, I've been having some trouble with my desktop recently. I have windows xp pro sp2, my internet connection is a little rigged. The wireless router that we use in my house is in another room, and my desktop doesn't have wireless, so I get the wireless signal with my laptop and I use a network bridge to send the connection over the wired connection on my laptop to my desktop. It's worked fine for a few weeks but just about an hour ago when I was noticing my laptop being really slow, and noticed that vsmon.exe, a zonealarm process, was still running and using a lot of CPU, even after I had uninstalled zonealarm some time ago to just start using windows firewall. So I start up in safemode and remove the program manually.

Restart the computer and everything was working fine. Transferred a file over ftp between my computers, started browsing the web with firefox, when firefox stops loading my pages. Internet explorer doesn't work either, but I can ping anything, and Windows Live messenger works as well. My laptop is working fine, it's what I'm using now. I restarted my desktop a second time, and again, mozilla worked for about 5 minutes, then stopped loading pages again.

I've tried turning Windows firewall off, repairing my connections, resetting everything. I tried to use the Network Diagnostics that comes with XP, it worked a couple times, and a couple times it comes up with errors in different places saying the test failed because of a 'request timed out' from a ping attempt.

Also, just thinking about it, a number of programs have recently been unable to connect to the internet, though I attributed it to the network bridge that I didn't really know how to set up, but the couple programs that I was thinking of are now able to successfully connect, but firefox is unable where it was always able to connect before.

If there is any other information that is needed just let me know, and thanks in advance for the help.

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by Jupiter 2

Dani AI

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A short diagnostic summary tied to the posts from , and : the combination of "ping and messenger OK" while web browsers fail, plus a recent uninstall of a third‑party firewall, strongly suggests leftover network-filtering components or a corrupted Winsock/TCP stack rather than a pure physical-layer problem. Bridging the laptop and desktop adds complexity and can mask whether the fault is on the desktop, the laptop, or the bridge itself.

Recommended, prioritized troubleshooting (do these in order and reboot between major steps):

  • As noted by , run the firewall vendor's official cleanup/cleanup utility and reboot to remove any leftover drivers or service hooks.
  • From an elevated Command Prompt reset the sockets and IP stack, then flush DNS:
netsh winsock reset
netsh int ip reset resetlog.txt
ipconfig /flushdns

Reboot after the resets.

  • Check for proxy or HTTP interception: inspect Internet Options -> Connections -> LAN Settings and Firefox/other browser connection settings for any proxy entries and clear them if present.
  • Temporarily break the bridge and connect the desktop directly to the router (or use the laptop only to share via ICS) to isolate whether the bridge is part of the failure.

Further checks and diagnostics:

  • In Local Area Connection properties look for and uninstall any non-Microsoft network components left behind by the firewall.
  • Verify NIC drivers in Device Manager and reinstall if needed.
  • Inspect the hosts file for suspicious entries and use netstat -ano to see which processes hold TCP ports.
  • Boot Safe Mode with Networking to see whether browsers can load (helps confirm a driver/service filter problem).

Note on other suggestions: 's disk check is good maintenance but is unlikely to fix HTTP-only failures caused by filtering/LSP/Winsock problems. If the above steps fail, consider a clean driver reinstall or restoring the TCP/IP stack via repair install.

Recommended Answers

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Member Avatar for gerbil

Firewalls integrate themselves pretty deeply into the sys [well, comprehensive ones do...] along the lines of AV services. Always check for removal tools from the makers sites when wanting to unistall such services. Here is one such for you:

Run it, and let it restart the sys.

Member Avatar for Jupiter 2

I am only a novice.
The wirless network device should be ADSL 2.0 and not DSL. DSL has security problems. ADSL 2,0 is also required when accessing internet via a bridge or other PC/laptop.

On each computer Type in run box in start pane (if visible)
CHKDSK /F
enter and restart
You get a screen at start up. Just let it run. Can take about 3 minutes depending on you HDD size and any other drives or partitions. Don't interrupt the disk checking.

If you are not using the printer port, ever, disable it. The Com port is used by power state even if its not being used, dont disable it. I'm still researching the use of unused com ports.
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