Not so much a rant as a message to anyone who missed this.
The last Microsoft security update will bork your PC if you have ZoneAlarm running.
Or rather it stops you accessing the internet. You can ping out, but good luck getting the SDMB. Of course this leads to the problem that the best way to find out is to barred.
There is a new ZoneAlarm patch which fixes it and a few suggested workarounds but nothing from Microsoft.
Of course, anyone suffering the problem isn’t going to see this anyway, but pass the word onto anyone suffering a complete absence of the SDMB. They will probably thank you for it.
The Zone Alarm patch should fix the issue on the Zone Alarm side.
The other workarounds are
[ul]
[li]Adjust the Internet Zone security slider to Medium [/li][li]Uninstall MS Patch KB951748 [/li][li]Add your DNS servers to the Trusted Zone [/li][/ul]
The latest ZoneAlarm press release has more details and instructions.
This issue looks to be only on Win XP and Win 2K but not Vista. Still annoying though.
I will be trying the patch tonight when I get home. I have already downloaded to mem stick as for some strange reason I cannot get online from that PC.
The good news is that it looks as though the patch has worked, hence posting from this PC.
Steps taken:
Deleted the Windows update to regain net access as a check.
Downloaded the ZoneAlarm Update and installed it.
Re-downloaded the Windows Update.
Ok, I’m still having serious probs with my desktop related to this (AFAIK at least).
I’ve followed the directions exactly, and no go. I’ve tried switching from wireless connection to wired, no good.
I’m considering this: downloading the patch to the Vista laptop, burning it to a CD and installing to the desktop from there - I’m hoping that will work. Bah.
My mother in law and sister in law’s computers both got borked by this. I just had them uninstall Zone Alarm, get online for the new version that works with the patch, and then reinstall it. That seemed to work for both of them.
Our XP machine was actually okay because I haven’t kept on top of installing updates for third-party stuff, but uninstalling the old version (7.something) of ZA and getting the new updated version turned into the typical hell Windows is so infamous for. For some reason, there was no control interface for ZA, and no uninstall program, so obviously something got screwed up sometime in the past. Getting rid of the faulty installation involved googling, registry hacks, several reboots, booting into safe mode (twice), manually deleting system-level files, and then finally an install. Hopefully that fun little adventure didn’t screw something else up.
The time spent doing informal tech support for the family and clearing up the problem on our own machine reminded me again why my own computer is a Mac. I’ve had zero down-time due to a software problem on my computer in the last four or five years. The ironic thing is that I still have to deal with Windows because my family uses it.
