So you think you are an expert...eh...PLEASE HELP ME

[SRGONE]

Very long....sorry.

First thanks for opening this post...it's a good start. I am almost ready to commit a homicide with this problem that I have been working on for the last two days. I built a PC for my girlfriend about a year and a half ago, so I am her designated technical support. I have been in the IT world for about 6 years and am currenlty in network security. I have also been at a help desk and done level two support, so I am not exactly a beginner.

Onto the problem, my girl's mom and boyfriend had a Comcast cable modem installed about a month ago (we were broken up at the time, so I didn't do it). Anyway, he installed it and at first had some NIC problems that a technician fixed with a new one. Had been working fine until Saturday nite. Supposedly nothing changed since it worked and stopped. On Friday I found out that they had been running with no firewall, so like the security aware guy that I am, I installed ZoneAlarm Pro. Worked fine Friday nite into Saturday. Then they call me on Sunday and tell me they are having problems getting out to the internet. I walked the boyfriend through testing the connection a bunch of ways and sure enough he wasn't able to get out.

I ended up going there and removing ZA, still nothing. I reinstalled ZA and then upgraded it to see if it didn't get completly removed. The uninstall worked fine but still can't get out. Here is what I do know. She is getting a valid IP, according to Comcast, I released and renewed it a bunch of times and keep getting the same address. I removed the NIC and reinstalled the drivers, I tried a new NIC, I installed the modem directly to the PC via USB with the correct drivers. I have deleted TCP/IP and reinstalled it. I am able to ping her from my house, comcast swears there are no outages in her area. I am not able to get to the internet even using IP addresses. I TO tracerouting a bunch of sites, but do get a reply every so many hops but eventually just timeout. I have re-installed Win98 on top of itself (didn't have anything else with me). I even had her delete two files that are supposedly ZA's DB without any results. I really don't want to have to format it and start over, but may end up just doing that to ensure a clean start. It is just driving me nuts that I have been able to figure out every other problem that I have encountered except this one.

The one thing that still puzzles me and why I keep going back to ZoneAlarm is that even though I uninstalled it and went through the registry and deleted everything I found with Zone in it whenever I re-install it, it still knows the serial no and doesn't ever ask me to allow apps through. I have gone in and added them manually as well.

Thanks a million for any suggestions and a gold star for anyone that has the fix.

Sergio

[EzyStvy]

Dupe post. Continued here:

So you think you're an expert eh...PLEASE HELP ME