What now!!??

Finally got all my upgrades completed and the system seems to working great. We tested it out last night with NWN which was a game I couldn't ever play on my computer before because of terrible lag. I played for over an hour with no trouble.
And most of my programs work just great.

BUT.....

Connecting to the internet, well, I'm not really sure what the heck is going on. I'm on msn, which I have always been, except for a short time when I switched to another isp and hated it. Anyway, I installed the latest version, msn 9, and it keeps prompting me to install the latest version of messenger or else I can't do anything else. I tried to do that a couple times and all I get is a freeze-up, with absolutely no response, or all these alerts informing me that my computer is in trouble etc..... I can't even d/l my zonealarm again until I d/l that messenger. I actually got it d/l completely, which took over an hour, but as soon as it was done it asked if I wanted to join the msn online service, I clicked yes, and again everything froze. Now it says I need to d/l the latest version of messenger AGAIN!!!

This morning I tried to connect to the internet again (it takes ages btw) and I kid you not, it took over 3 minutes for Ageless to come in! :eek: All the while I kept getting popups to d/l that messenger again. Another thing, my connection is so much slower than ever it was before. We've checked to make sure everything is hooked up right and can't find a single thing.

I don't know if anyone else has msn and have had similar problems or not, but I'm so frustrated. Behind every cloud is another cloud. Where the hey is that silver lining?!

Hi Lynn..

Congrats on the upgrades! *smiles* I'm glad it's working for the most part, unfortunately, the part that isn't working, seems critical!

Let's see...

What kind of connection do you have? Dialup or Broadband? First off, I'd probably make sure the drivers for the modem (or nic card) are right. I've seen modems have drivers installed, and they seem right because the card works, but doesn't work exactly right. And the reason being, is that driver was wrong. So, a quick check and make sure the driver is correct.

Probably the next thing I would do, is COMPLETELY uninstall MSN....delete the folder as well and then reinstall it. (If you downloaded the latest version, I'd redownload it too.) It's possible it got boo'boo'ed up somehow....in either the download or the installation.

Also, make sure the Windows Firewall isn't on. It should NOT be messing up your connection, however...I've heard of it causing a lil havoc and causing it to screw up. To turn it off or see if it's on...go to your Control Panel in XP....then you should see an icon with "Windows Firewall"...double click that. Then, in the next box, choose "Off."

Try that Lynn, and see if it helps.

~Dan

Well I can finally get back online... temporarily perhaps, I'm not sure yet. LOL.

I spoke too soon. We started having a lot of trouble offline as well as on. Turns out it was my old soundcard. So we had to remove that and uninstall it off the computer and suddenly the other problems went away. Now I'm able to get back online, and today I'm going to try to d/l that messenger again, and if it is still giving me trouble, then I'll try what you suggested. Oh, btw, I don't see the icon for Windows Firewall. Perhaps I don't have one?

For now we have dial-up, but we just found out that dsl is now available down here in our valley so we want to look into getting that. But how do I check the drivers for my modem? Sorry to be such a ninny at this kind of stuff. :o

Lynn...

You could try installing the soundcard in a different PCI slot than what it originally was in. It didn't occur to me at the time until you said you removed it and it worked...but, it's possible that it was sharing the same IRQ number as the modem...

Moving it to a different slot may change that...and let both of them work.

Oh, about the firewall icon. You are probably in category view. On the left hand side you should see something that says, "Swich to Classic View"..click on that and it should change to a classic view...and that is where the icon should be.

As for checking your modem drivers? Mainly, just make sure that what it says in the Device Manager, is what is in your system. However, at this point, I think it may be an IRQ conflict between the Sound Card and the Modem. Which, you might have fixed.

~Dan

Well here I am again at long last. One problem after another with ... oh I don't know, msn9; messenger; zonealarm.... could be all of that. Sometimes I couldn't sign on for taffy, while other times the connection was so bad it took several minutes for one page to load. I finally uninstalled msn9 and installed msn8, said NO to messengers new version and so far things have smoothed out somewhat.

Zonealarm keeps alerting me to different things of course, and one of them that concerns me is Generic Host Process for Win32 Services. What is that? Is it something to do with XP? When I denied it access I couldn't get online at all. Yet, when I finally decided to give it access I was able to sign on, but then I got all these alerts from ZA of several ip addresses from certain ports that ZA blocked. Is this connected to that General Host Process?

Hey Lynn...

Glad you're slowly getting the bugs worked out!

That GHP looks to be something legit. Had to do a bit of research on it. Yeah, it's needed for some things to work..some things I saw mentioned specifically are like auto update and the clock synch...

But, it is legit...as long as it's not giving you any problems...I'd say you're good to go with allowing it through the firewall.