WD Breaks Winsock on XP Home SP2

[Robert J Basye3rd]

** I Just installed and ran Windows Defender beta2 on a
SP2 machine. It cleaned some threats and asked
to reboot. After reboot, a security center message popped
up saying that firewall is off.
I tried to start the firewall and it failed because the
service can not start.
I reinstalled WD to no avail the problem was still there so I
I had to reinstall Winsock in order to fix it.

 

[Guest]

Robert

I also have had connectivity problems since upgrading from Beta1 to Beta 2.
(XP2 Pro, SP2). Same symptoms as you - Outlook Express, IE6 give up soon
after (not immediately) saying not connection or DNS error.

Can I ask - do you have a cable connection to the world?
I have seen one other such report in
microsoft.private.security.spyware.announcements
(Thread - 'Need help re emails won't send' )

 

[Robert J Basye]

Kes

Yes I do have a cable connection to the internet. My other computers are
connection via a linksys router. I didn't have this issue with beta 1. I did
have windows firewall running during install so maybe that is an issue with
WD corrupting the winsock.

Robert

 

[Bill Sanderson]

So resetting winsock fixed the issue?

I hope that Microsoft is getting better at fixing threats without breaking
winsock.

I hesitate to ask this, cause I'm not sure it would be of interest, and I'm
not sure how easy it would be for you to do, but the only way I know to get
a good list of what was cleaned is to save the system event log as a CSV
file, load it into excel. sort on the source column and delete the entries
that aren't WinDefend, and then save the result as an XLS.

That could be compressed and attached to a message here, or sent on request.
It'd be interesting to know what got cleaned that had this effect.

 

[Bill Sanderson]

Have you reset winsock?

command prompt

netsh winsock reset <enter>

--

 

[Guest]

No Bill, when I satisfied myself that it was Beta 2 causing the trouble, I
uninstalled it and went back to Beta 1. If by June 2006 (expiry date of Beta
1) Beta 2 has still not
resolved this problem, I'll do without Windows Defender.

 

[Bill Sanderson]

OK - then your issue was a different one. Uninstalling Windows Defender
wouldn't reset Winsock.

--

 

[Guest]

Actually not. I first 'Restored system' to a previous known good state,
removed
WD... and alll is well since.