Internet Woes by Microsoft

Order of events:
A little before 11:30 pm on Wednesday, I shut down my computer and it asks to download the latest updates. As Chris and probably both of them though only one of them has stated such, I have become a lazy IT person who just accepts the updates and goes on with life. I use to check them out but that stopped at least a year ago.
Just before midnight, there was a power surge and all the power went out in the apartment for at least a minute.

I reset the cable/internet box and all was well with the TV. I didn’t check the internet because all seemed okay.

Thursday morning, I woke and tried to get on the internet. I tried both my ATT U-verse and the dial-up connection. Though both were connecting to the internet, none of the applications were working to access the internet. I tried some debugging with the help of a friend but didn’t get anywhere. It became weirder when Pauline also could not access the internet from her computer, which uses Comcast Internet. The question now was why neither of us could get on the internet with three different connection types. We were both unfortunately stuck on the whole power outage scenario and I didn’t really think about the fact that she too may have downloaded the latest Microsoft updates.

So Pauline and I headed to the library to get some work done. My brain was fried apparently or maybe I have been out of IT too long to remember where to go to find such issues. Then again had I been thinking that it was an update issue instead of a network type issue, maybe I would have checked out Microsoft or one of the numerous other IT websites out there.

Upon returning that night, our internet still did not work so I called ATT to see what they could tell me. Sure enough the issue was the Microsoft Updates. They could even tell me which update was the culprit KB951748. But their solution from Microsoft made no sense. It was to delete cookies, files, and history from IE and set IE back to all its defaults. Not sure how that would resolve the larger issue of all of my applications not wanting to interact with the internet, though I could successfully ping external websites. It did not solve the issue and she suggested that I would have to talk to Microsoft or the computer company. That wasn’t going to happen.

So it was off to the next best solution, who do I know that surely has heard of the issue by now and could assist me. So I got a hold of Chris and he checked out the latest and greatest on the particular security update. It definitely was the culprit because the update and Zone Alarm apparently don’t play nicely together. Solutions shutdown Zone Alarm, uninstall the patch, or hardcode the DNS into Zone Alarm. Not hip on the disable of Zone Alarm and too tired to try to figure out the hardcoding, I just went with the uninstall of the update and miraculously everything was working again and that is the lovely internet saga for Thursday.