February 15, 2007
 at 11:34 pm
 in microsoft, software, windows

Staying on topic with my previous two posts about my upgrade to Windows Vista, I’m still very happy I made the upgrade and absolutely loving Vista. However, with that said, I have one persisting problem.

Randomly throughout the day while I’m browsing the internet I suddenly cannot connect anymore. Sounds like a typical connection problem, right? Think again. What’s even more strange about this issue is that only my browser connectivity cuts out. I always have mIRC open with an active connection to various networks. I always have Trillian open with several chat windows open. I have Thunderbird open which is regularly downloading any new email. Every single application outside of my browsers is able to connect perfectly fine. Yet as soon as I try to do something in a browser (whether it’s Firefox, Opera, or IE7), I have absolutely no connectivity.

But wait, it gets stranger. I can’t even connect to my router. Even worse, I can’t even connect to localhost. Yet I can do pings and tracerts in the command line to absolutely anywhere I like with no problem whatsoever.

Clearing all cache has no effect. Disabling/enabling the network card has no effect. Releasing and renewing my IP does nothing. Flushing the DNS cache does nothing. Manually editing my HOSTS file to point to a specific IP is pointless. Updating to the latest drivers doesn’t work. Heck, I can log off my user account and log back in and nothing budges.

And to top it all off on the weirdness scale, there is absolutely nothing in the Event Viewer to indicate anything strange or any error occurred at any point anywhere close to the time I lost connectivity. No failed drivers, no security restrictions, no memory allocation errors. Nothing.

I don’t consider myself to an MCSE or anything, but I’ll be honest and say I know a heck of a lot and I know how to fix most any issue that comes up. But this one has me completely and utterly stumped.

So I decided to buckle down and call Microsoft. So after going through 30 minutes of verifying that my version of Vista Ultimate had actually been activated, I’m put on with a tech support rep who had a hard time firstly understanding what the problem was, and secondly understanding that I probably knew a infinite amount more than her about Windows. But I decided to play along for the time being.

But after she asked me to uninstall the Google Toolbar from IE7 and use a proxy server, I put my foot down and said clearly that Internet Explorer is not the problem! I mean, come on? The first thing I said to this rep when I got on the phone was it wasn’t local to Internet Explorer. It happens with any browser and anytime I try to access something via the HTTP protocol. Apparently that flies over her head.

I also indicated very clearly the only way I had found to temporarily resolve the problem was to reboot the computer. Yet she instructs me to reboot into Safe Mode after I put my foot down and corrected her about the toolbar/proxy. At that point, I gave up and asked to be moved to a Tier 2 rep. After a bit of trouble with that, I at least get on with someone who knows what they’re talking about.

I can at least talk to this guy in technical jargon and he trusts me when I say I’ve tried things that haven’t worked.
So he gave me a slightly modified driver to try … which unfortunately required me to reboot.

I honestly don’t think it’ll work. So basically, at this point I’m just waiting for the issue to pop its head up again.

Lesson learned: ask for a Tier 2 rep right off the bat.

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