Firefox/TBird Has Intermittent Trouble Accessing Internet on Win98

Hi,

This is a problem that I've noticed for quite sometime on one of my computers.

I'm running Win 98 SE on a PIII 450 with 256 MB RAM. I have a DSL connection through a Linksys router which serves a few PCs.

On the 98 PC, I'm running Thunderbird 1.06, Firefox 1.06, latest version on Zonelabs' site of ZoneAlarm 5.5094 (I haven't upgraded to the version on Major Geeks yet). Every now and then, when browsing the Internet or retreiving email, my Internet connection gets blocked. TBird reports mail server is not responding, and Firefox times out trying to resolve any url. The only way that I was able to resolve this problem in the past was rebooting the machine. I noticed this morning that if I invoke IE (it's an old version, 6.028 - I gave up on IE a long time ago) the problem immediately is resolved. I can't access the Internet in IE, Firefox and TBird without rebooting.

This only happens on my 98 machine. My ME and XP machines don't have this problem. At first I thought it might be something wrong with my ISP (their DNS Server), router or even firewall until I saw that IE fixes the problem.

What is wrong? Any ideas? Has anyone seen this behavior before?

Thanks.

 

OK. After a day of the successful IE workaround, the IE workaround now fails too. Although invoking IE solved the problem at first, it doesn't anymore. I had to reboot.

Are there any network debugging tools to help me track the block? ZoneAlarm doesn't seem to invoke an Internet lock. Something locks access. I see no activity in ZoneAlarm when attempting to access the Internet when the problem occurs. Needless to say, there is also no Ethernet activity on the modem.

Shutting down ZoneAlarm has no effect.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

 

IE workaround works again...