Vista - Google Earth issue with Vista and Firewalls

Hmm, think the malicious toolbar name description in the body of my message is causing it to not get posted

I posted this earlier, will try and edit the hotbar name in RED just substitute IST for it.

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I was having trouble getting google earth to work for our CIO on his vista machine behind our firewall, the error "We were unable to connect to the Google Earth servers to authenticate your account" kept popping up, even though I verified the hosts were reachable via the built in test app, and manual browsing.

After many hours of troubleshooting, and discovering that there are a LOT of posts out there with no solution to the problem, I thought I would share my findings on making google earth on vista work behind a corporate firewall.

If you go to googles support site, they say to make sure port 80 is open for the following hosts

kh.google.com
maps.google.com
auth.keyhole.com

Typically this isnt the problem, as everyone seems to be able to get to those locations successfully.

The problem that I discovered was that when google earth goes out to the internet it uses a user-agent similar to:

GoogleEarth/5.0.11337.1968(Windows;Microsoft Windows Vista (Service Pack 1);en;kml:2.2;client:Free;type:default)


Unfortunately most firewalls (such as Checkpoint Firewall-1) as well as many spyware/malware scanners are enabling protection against a malicious hotbar called eye sss tea Bar which used IST in its user agent header.

This meant my firewall was blocking any outbound web browsing if the user agent had vISTa in it, like the google earth app had. Once I discovered this, and changed the default protection for that hotbar I was able to get to google earth from behind my firewall using vista.

I hope this helps some folks out there

I turned my firewall completely off, and I still couldn't connect to google earth. I have a feeling now that it is Windows Defender.

You need to create an account for Google earth.

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http://www.astorandblack.com/

"Ramsteren" <guest@xxxxxx-email.com> wrote in message
news:3bdcbeb0a707507e006abd1310f0fff5@xxxxxx-gateway.com...

Create an account in Google Earth forums? or with Google Earth itself. Message error says, "we were unable to connect to the servers to activate your account."

FYI: I have a Google Earth forum account too, and a lot of people having the same problem.

I tried to give IE explicit permission to google earth servers.

I did did several things and I'm not sure which fixed it.

1) uninstalled google earth
2) opened regedit and deleted all folders to google earth.
3) deleted all cookies and temp files
4) discovered that I had an additional firewall from Sphinx for Vista 64 that when I went to go uninstall some programs. I uninstalled it which was most likely the problem, but on the Google Earth websites, everyone said they lost connection upon upgrading to higher versions of google earth. That's why I cleaned every trace of google earth off my computer before reinstalling.
5) Reinstalled Google Earth 5 and it works. SHOCK!

Not only that, but I didn't have to re-setup the permissions in vista's firewall. It works fine without the exceptions. It worked before and I never had to give exceptions and reconfigure a rule in the router itself (as some suggested).

Well, I will tell you what I did know, and that was that unless it was a browser (IE or Firefox) on Port 80, no other type of connection worked. I still can't get my e-mail, and have to use browser to go to e-mail website to get it.

I still have AVG going.