Windows Vista driving me nuts - again! Anyone help?

[White House Workshop]

WHW / Tony, are you by any chance running a software firewall such as Zone Alarm on the machine controlling the Printer?

Yes - ZA and AVG are running on all the machines. I've checked the settings and they all look fine.

have you got network discovery turned on?
http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Window ... d1033.mspx


Also if you have a home network are the machines all in the same workgroup?

True on both counts.

What I find is really annoying is that everything was working fine for about 3 months until it just decided to stop working and I can't find out why....

 

[Travis]

This may not help with your problem but it made me feel better

Travis

 

[CHJ]

WHW / Tony, are you by any chance running a software firewall such as Zone Alarm on the machine controlling the Printer?

Yes - ZA and AVG are running on all the machines. I've checked the settings and they all look fine.
...

Well Zone Alarm is my guess, don't ask me why, but I know that it had to be removed from all its hidden depths from machines in one very sophisticated setup, because it constantly lost the plot with M$ Vista security and XP machines after a particular update.
Some machines had to be reformatted as the quickest way to get rid of ZA hooks that were causing problems.

We never did assertain the problem other than that after removing ZA everything works fine.

 

[RogerS]

I'm saying nothing...

That's a nice looking computer, Smudger :wink:

 

[Malc]

I'm assuming you have tried with Zone Alarm turned off with no success?

I had a problem with Bitdefender. I could not backup certain documents. I turned bitdefender off and still it did not work but then found that there where still 2 services running in task manager. Once I killed them off everything was ok so at least I knew where the problem was. I'm just wondering if Zone alarm does the same thing

 

[Gower]

Further to Titan & MR's comments to Gill re Linux. They forgot an important point. Not only is Linux great, it's also FREE.

Cheers
Gower

 

[mr]

Further to Titan & MR's comments to Gill re Linux. They forgot an important point. Not only is Linux great, it's also FREE.

Cheers
Gower

Did I forget that? On the contrary I am a heavy linux / unix user and pm ed Gill to tell her how to best effect a removal of her troublesome vista and install a linux distro. PM rather than pollute this thread - though praps you weren't referring to me or praps I misunderstood? But in either case Linux is both great and free as you say.

Cheers Mike

 

[Gower]

Whoops! My lighthearted comments seem to have been taken as a criticism MR. None intended, I can assure you.

Here's to Linux!

Gower

 

[mr]

Whoops! My lighthearted comments seem to have been taken as a criticism MR. None intended, I can assure you.

Here's to Linux!

Gower

Not at all, Im not sure I entirely understood what you were getting at, and was aware of my lack of comprehension when reading It seems to me that the "fix" for all these vista problems, apparently Vista doesn't allow for a format c: type command, is to bung a live distro in the drive and reformat. Linux ftw as they say.


Cheers Mike

 

[White House Workshop]

I think I may have discovered the problem. Z-A seems to have decided that the printer is on a fixed IP address (at least that's what shows in the trusted zone list), but the IP address is actually assigned by the router quite simply as the order in which the various machines are switched on/connect.

I'm laid up at the moment and won't have time for more investigation until later. Thank goodness I can be in my sickbed with a wireless laptop!!!

 

[Dave S]

I've heard it said that Vista is a resource-hog, but this is ridiculous :shock:

Dave

p.s. it actually finished about 5minutes after this screenshot....

 

[misterfish]

A mere 76 years!




.

 

[White House Workshop]

Problem solved -- until the next time.

Turns out that the shared access to the printer had been turned off. No idea how as no-one logs into that machine - it just sits there as a print server.

Vista still isn't totally happy, but at least we can print again, for now.