zonealarm and networks.

for four days now i have been fighting two xp machines tring to make them talk to each other.

running the network wizard to make a connection always worked and each machine could 'see' the other one but no way would they allow each other access to files.

these two machines are not on the internet altho one was until recently.
once it came offline i shut down avg/spybot teatimer and ZONEALARM from the start menu, no point in them running if a machine is offline permanently imo.

last night a talented friend came round to try to solve the problem for me, among other things booting both machines in knoppix to use his talent to sniff out the ethernet cards and find out why they wont work.

long story short, altho ZONEALARM was shut down and not running, behind the scenes its services were running and thus causing a problem.

if only i had know this last monday! such a silly thing to cause such a headache, needless to say zonealarm is now not on the machine and my network is fabulous

sometimes those problems that drive us nuts are staring us right in the face!
bloody zonealarm!

 

Keep in mind it was only doing what it was designed to do. ed

 

to a degree I would agree, but when you CLOSE a program down, you dont think its services will be running in the background. EXIT means EXIT!!!!!

i shut down zonealarm from the startup menu at the beginning of the network wizard, so i wouldnt expect its services to still start, had i thought of it i could have checked 'processes' but it never occured that the services would still fire up in the background. I gueuss one clue would have been how the windows firewall activates as part of the network setup. Having said that I did go in to the tcp properties /advanced and turn off firewall for the ethernet connection.

Partly why i wrote this thread, there could be someone else one day searching forums for 'help my network wont work' or 'zonealarm issues'

thanks for your comment