I am on a single-user home PC and have a 3rd party firewall and virus
checker. Update settings are switched off as I collect these manually.
When my dial-up modem connection is established I am unable to use it
for several minutes, even though ZoneAlarm shows no sign of activity
from other apps which might be trying to hog the connection.
Additionally, I am unable to launch any apps for those several minutes -
even apps which have no need of net connection. ZoneAlarm used to advise
me of Windows Explorer's constant attempts to connect until I set it to
disallow such attempts. AVG, Ewido Anti-Malware and SpyBot S&D all give
me a clean bill of health and I believe this to be true

I am guessing that either some service/s are running which ought not to
be, or else some which ought to be running are not

Getting very vexed. Can someone please direct me to a source of
reliable, concise, not too technical information on services which
should be enabled/set to manual or disabled? I have done the usual
Googling, but have either been blinded by technical info or confused by
inconsistency between sites

For clarification: This happens ONLY when you establish a modem
connection, and specificaly NOT after booting up, right? In
other words, you can be running along using your computer, and
decide to connect with your modem and THEN that slowdown occurs?

I'm trying to separate the problem from a slow boot time.
Also, how long is "several" minutes?

All I can think of at the moment is maybe check Event Log to see
if there are any hints in there. It's in Administrative Tools.

IMO more info is needed to get closer to an answer.

HTH
Pop

Filthy McNasty wrote:

Make sure the Windows Firewall is disabled when using ZA and you might try
using the Windows Firewall instead of ZA temporarily to see if that makes
any difference. If you can open Task Manager when all this is going on try
that to see if any process is hogging all the CPU cycles other than system
idle process. It would not hurt to try to boot into Safe Mode with
networking to see what happens but before you do that make sure you are
using the Windows Firewall instead of ZA as ZA will most likely be disabled
in Safe Mode with networking. If that seems to help you could try
troubleshooting using msconfig and selective startup to disable non
essential services and logon processes then enabling a few at a time until
you find the problem. If you have not used msconfig just enter msconfig...

Using at least one appendage, the entity known in this space-time
continuum as =?Utf-8?B?S2FybCBMZXZpbnNvbiwgbXZw?=
securityadmin.info> revealed in
news:01B62D98-1AD2-4C23-A296-334D69BCD281@microsoft.com:

Well, as I said, I know just enough to get into trouble. I had been
setting a number of services from Automatic to Manual as a result of
advice on a number of websites. DOH! Should have done one at a time, but
....