Vista - At the end of my tether with vista/ie7

No problem Hdbg62,

It would be normal to still have internet access and not be able to load some random websites with your ISP having a bad DNS address in use. The website may load at some times and not others.

The link above has full instructions on how to do this including the open DNS addresses to use.

O.k., got it set up and will try for a few days. Is this something you'd recommend for permanent use if it does fix the problem or should I get back with my provider (AT&T)? Thank you for your interest and time, you have no idea how frustrating this has been, ever since I got my new system along with a new ISP. I will report back.

Just happened again. Browsing in Firefox, a page would not load, tried to open another page which also would not load, closed Firefox, tried to restart Firefox and 1st popup tells me that whatever site I tried to open could not be found, 2nd popup tells me Firefox is already running and I should close it or restart, opened task manager and tried to end process for Firefox which has no response (why am I unable to do that?), closed task manager and hit restart
which results in a long delay before logging off and shutting down begins, finally system restarts and all is back to normal until next time. Of course I do have internet connection because e-mail works. This scenario has been the same with IE7, IE8 and the latest version of Firefox.

One question, a while back I had an AT&T tech here because of slow connection speeds which he took care of but he also advised me that I was real close to my limit as far as distance to my nearest signal is concerned and I might have to downgrade my service to 3000 from 6000 Kbps; could this be the culprit?

The distance could be part of the issue. If you are to far, it could cause a dropout like this. I would recommend calling AT&T and have them check your line for any problems and let them know about the websites not loading to see if that is the issue or not.

The maximum distance for 6000 bps is 7000' and I'm at the upper 6800's and at 87% of something I don't remember.. I shall ask them to reduce my service down to 3000 Kbps for a week or so to see if that makes any difference.

Just talked with AT&T and was told everything looked fine, "why downgrade?" CSR spent half an hour inside my machine checking on DSL and browser settings and then I lost him on my AT&T cell; they have my number but never did call back. Didn't expect anything different, really; guess it's back to the old "tether". Sorry to have bothered you guys.

It no bother at all. Please let us know how it turns out.

Waited a whole day before posting this. So far Firefox has not been a problem in the last 24 hours; neither has IE7 but I've only used that on a limited basis. As I'm stating in my post, I want to give each 3-4 days. My immunization settings in Spybot for Firefox are still for cookies only; if everything works out for Firefox I'll have to change that back to normal just to see if indeed that makes a difference as stated in the Spybot link in MozillaZine and also to determine just which one, Zonelab or Spybot is the culprit.

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Thought I'd give y'all an update on my problem. As I said, this has been really frustrating to say the least. Yesterday I went through all settings I changed/played with based on information and tutorials from this group and I found that in TCP GLOBAL PARAMETERS the first three items were set to DISABLED; how that happened, I have no clue. Just like a couple of internet registry settings which I know I changed a while back but discovered to be back at default after installing IE8. In any case, I thought I had me something there and set those first 3 items in TCP GLOBAL PREFERENCES back to enabled, enabled and normal and began browsing both in Firefox and IE7; no go, same problem occurred again.

Then I started googling and I couldn't believe it, I found a post that could have been written by me!

Internet Browser Problems - microsoft.public.internetexplorer.general | Google Groups

As I already had done Avast and Spybot scans on numerous occasions and wanted to avoid for now doing a HIJACKTHIS, I scanned other pages in that thread and stumbled on MozillaZine regarding this problem.

Firefox hangs - MozillaZine Knowledge Base

The item of particular interest to me was HANG AT EXIT and the references in it to SPYBOT, AVAST and ZONE LAB. To make a long story short, what I did was disable all immunization for Firefox except cookies, uninstall Zonelab Free Firewall and install Comodo after reading the review on it in .pcmag. I will probably undo that change in Spybot just to have one change at a time but for now since last night I have not had a single instance of Firefox "doing its thing". While I'm aware that all this has only to do with Firefox and I have a similar problem with IE7, I do hope this "cure" will last long enough (3-4 days) so I can try it on IE7.

BTW, I really AM impressed with Comodo, seems to run smoother and start faster; if anyone has any comments to the contrary, I'd like to hear them.

Perhaps I'm again getting ahead of myself for posting this before my "test period" expires" but I think there might be others with the same problem and interested in reading the MozillaZine article.

In conclusion, I also turned UAC back on which was set to off ever since I got this rig. Don't think that would affect anything but somehow, now, it's not such a big deal anymore to have the popups even when I'm signed in as an administrator; and the perhaps added protection might be worth it.

Well it's the end of my fourth day. Using Firefox, I've not had one single instance of the aforementioned occurances; i.e. NO CRASH!
I changed back to total immunization for Firefox in Spybot a couple of days ago and got no bad results because of it. So the culprit must be ZoneAlarm Firewall because that is now the only thing that has been changed. Will start with IE7 tomorrow for the same period of time and report back.

IE7 is also behaving perfectly. Again, all I did was use one of Mozillazines suggestions and remove ZoneAlarm Free Firewall and replace it. Can't imagine ZoneAlarm not being aware of this; in any case, they're not too happy hearing about this in their forum. I take everything back I ever said bad about Vista, am downright happy with it!


Firefox hangs - MozillaZine Knowledge Base