[Kingleon]

Hi guys, this is driving me up the freaking wall and even has my tech support friends scratching their heads.

Some of the programs on my computer (HP Pavillion 6040us with Vista Home; bought the week of Thanksgiving) won't connect to the Internet at all. One of them, amazingly, is IE, but it took me forever to notice being an Opera fanboy.

What Doesn't Connect so far:
Sidebar (which is what I noticed first, when I could no longer know the weather!)
IE (it says it can't connect to the Internet)
Spybot (says there are no new updates when there are)
Adaware (says there was an error connecting to the update server)

What Does:
Google Talk
Opera
Firefox
Skype
Google Earth (but not if I click on a link)
Pidgin
Norton Antivirus (it gets upgrades JUST FINE)

The Problem of Time Chronology
Sidebar and IE went down around the eighth. I know sidebar went down then, because before Sidebar tries to connect, it flashes the weather from that day (it was a warm day in Chicago around then). I think it coincided with the Windows Updates, I don't know which one. IE went down then or shortly after that; I remember trying to load a page related to Spybot in IE a few days later and it failed to connect.

Spybot was the first program that refused to connect. It wouldn't install the week of December 15th when I first downloaded it, and it took me half a month to realize I had to unclick "check for upgrades" in the install dialogue.

So, it may be two problems. Maybe Spybot and Adaware just hate auto-updating in Vista. I don't know. I do know that when Spybot and IE would try to connect, it would set off my ZoneAlarm firewall, so it was getting that far at least.

What I Have Tried
My University's tech support referred to my ZoneAlarm firewall with disparaging terms, so I uninstalled it, even though I had tried all these programs with ZoneAlarm off. IE/Sidebar/Spybot still didn't connect properly, after reboot. So then I tried with Windows Firewall off. Nope, didn't affect anything.

A tech support file I found while Googling (I think it was a Notre Dame or Duke tech support) suggested upgrading Spybot manually and then using Spybot Hosts tool to delete all Hosts except for "localhost". There were only two "localhost" listed, deleting one deleted both, so I did nothing.

HP tech support suggested resetting IE. Did nothing. Then they suggested running Windows Malicious Software Finder Thingy Tool. Found nothing. Nothing nothing nothing.

A friend suggested resetting winsock using the cmd application. I reset winsock. It did nothing.

I decided maybe the new Vista SP1 RC would change things. I tried downloading it. I got my old buddy, the 800B0100 error, which I'd tried correcting before with another update, only to fail miserably.

Strangely, this problem is more irritating than anything, really, which is what makes it all the more insistent I solve it.

[Kingleon]

bump

[Kingleon]

One final bump... I guess my situation really is hopeless.