Help with Windows XP (non-Pro) System Restore...

Sometime last week or so, my main PC suddenly became invisible to all other computers on my home network. I couldn’t even ping it, much less access its shared files and devices.

I checked for the Windows Firewall being enabled; no dice.

I had not installed any software of any kind recently, except maybe a Firefox version upgrade when prompted to do so. Hmmm.

On a hunch, I tried using System Restore for the first time, to restore it to the system config from the prior week. And bingo, my PC is once again visible.

Now I’m a bit unsettled. What was the week over week config change?

In theory (as I understand it) System Restore is only managing my Registry and driver info. Shouldn’t I have some kind of “diff report” between the config from yesterday, and the config from a week prior that I restored it to?

My System Restore “Wizard” didn’t have any button to show a report about the last restore, though. I figure there might be a file somewhere around documenting the diff (since the restore is reversable) but was unable to find this through either Windows XP Help, Google or the Microsoft Knowledge Base.

Any ideas from the SDMB?

I’ve never heard of such a diff report, I could be wrong though. As I’m sure you know, the registry is made up on the fly from several files on your computer. Among other things, the registry contains multiple “boot configs”. When you create a System Restore Point you create a new config, your previously one moves down to #2. You can use third party software to compare the two threes.

It could be more to it than this, I’ve not messed around much with the XP.

It’s pretty impossible to say what went wrong over the weekend, without info about your network setup. It sounds like your PC either didn’t get an IP or wasn’t able to communicate its presence to other network devices.

I figured it “should” be built in to the System Restore utility as it is – in fact, I would have thought it’d be useful to see a pre-restore listing of exactly what would be changed/rolled back in a restore operation between two dates before executing the restore. Sure that’s an “expert user” type of thing, but it’s really nothing more than opening up what’s obviously going on under the hood just a bit. (Not really Microsoft’s philosophy, I know…)

Yeah, I know. I could still use my network printer and access the internet through my router from this PC, for example (including being able to ssh out and also connect to my company’s VPN), and it had an IP address optained through DNS from the router… It was just invisible on my own home network BEHIND my router’s firewall. Weird.

General config: I have a Linksys WRT54G router/switch connected to a cable modem. I have four PCs and a laser printer connected directly to it (one of the four ports on the WRT54G is connected to a 4-port switch), and three or four other laptops, computers and a wireless MP3 music client connected via 802.11g.

The PC in question that became “invisible” is one of the ones directly attached to the router, through Port #1 in fact, as its DNS given IP address is 192.168.1.100 (the first dynamically allocated address).

Usually when this PC “goes invisible” it’s because I have the Cisco VPN connection on to connect to my job’s network, which makes sense – if I close the VPN session it comes back. That wasn’t the case this time, though, as far as I could tell; the system process list did not include the VPN processes. I did try rebooting the PC a few times before going the System Restore route.