Damn Windows Update!

ZA is a PITA. It blocks one of my web sites from exchanging passwords with iTunes. We have to tell people to disable it.

Six or seven years ago it was pretty good. It just got more and more annoying until it got to the point where it's more trouble than it's worth. Shame, really.
 
I fell victim to this as well, aided and abetted by my service provider, Charter. (of whom I cannot speak in polite company)

Unable to connect, I tried the "automated service" and suffered through the re-set procedure before I could speak to a human.
This fine fellow ran numerous diagnostics, and decided it was my computer. "You're not connecting to Port 80", says he, "you need to contact the manufacturer."

Well, that seemed unlikely, so I plugged the cable modem into my laptop with the same result.
Another call, and I was duly advised by yet another technician that we had an "outage" in the area. "Didn't the first technician check that?"

So, this morning, still with no connectivity, I called again, and finally got the recorded message about Zone alarm.
Installed the latest version of ZA and all was well....
 
Simple solution; Get a four port switching hub and put it in there... But I suspect the real reason is that your modem-to-router cable has to be an uplink cable (RX/TX pairs reversed from the usual cable) and only one of the cables you are using is like that. On many routers there is a little pushbutton near the uplink port you can use to change this expectation.

Better yet, just make the problem go away. As the phone is for my daughter (a Mac user) who has no network, I just bypassed ny network and plugged the telephone box between the modem and my Win XP notebook. Everything checked out and I'll try installing it at her house tomorrow.
 

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