"cquirke (MVP Win9x)" <
[email protected]>
Too true. You're lucky not to have to deal with AOL very often.
Amen - along with the wrath of Thor (lightning-destroyed modems and
PCs are a fact of life inland, but rare in Cape Town)
Sadly, the only practical way I've ever found to _completely_ remove
AOL from an operating system is to format the hard drive and perform a
clean installation. It takes a lot less time than manually
removing/replacing all of the Windows system files that AOL replaces
with their own versions and the hundreds of registry entries.
That's nasty. The time equation may differ for me, given I spend a
lot of time setting up the system from scratch. OTOH Winsock-level
hassles are the one DUN failure situation where I can't guarantee a
clean fix (
http://users.iafrica.com/c/cq/cquirke/dundebug.htm refers)
I remember the very first incarnation of the SFP concept, dating all
the way back to the original Win95. Before that, Winsock and TCP/IP
were things that had to be added by the ISP or proprietary online
service, and were; typically, this was the 16-bit Trumpet Winsock.
Win95 defended its own Winsock by auto-replacing these files when it
found them to be changed on each startup, using backup copies stored
in the SYSBCKUP directory that Win98 later used for RB*.cab
In general, Microsoft recommends running only one software
firewall at a time. If you're going to use a 3rd-party solution, I'd
recommend disabling the built-in firewall. It's not automated,
though. You'll have to manually enable and/or disable the built-in
Windows Firewall, as the situation warrants.
Yes, but I was thinking specifically about the window of vulnerability
between onset of networking and the startup of the 3rd-party firewall.
AFAIK from reading docs on the topic, SP2 addresses this by having
XP's firewall in place and active from the moment networking starts;
the firewall starts with restrictive initial settings, then once
everything's up and running it adjusts to the user's chosen settings.
Where the user's settings are to disable the firewall, does the
firewall then exit? Or if disabled, does it not startup in the first
place, thus leaving the PC at risk until the 3rd-party gets going?
I can think of one problem with the former (malware-safer) approach,
namely that the built-in firewall effect may tangle the 3rd-party
firewall's initialization. This isn't a new issue; one often sees
Zone Alarm dialogs to the effect that it's trying to init the
TrueVector engine, when other startup fleas are calling home etc.
Presumably this happens to other firewalls that don't show a
(non-)progress indication?
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"If I'd known it was harmless, I'd have
killed it myself" (PKD)
