Well, I've been having some trouble with my desktop recently. I have windows xp pro sp2, my internet connection is a little rigged. The wireless router that we use in my house is in another room, and my desktop doesn't have wireless, so I get the wireless signal with my laptop and I use a network bridge to send the connection over the wired connection on my laptop to my desktop. It's worked fine for a few weeks but just about an hour ago when I was noticing my laptop being really slow, and noticed that vsmon.exe, a zonealarm process, was still running and using a lot of CPU, even after I had uninstalled zonealarm some time ago to just start using windows firewall. So I start up in safemode and remove the program manually.

Restart the computer and everything was working fine. Transferred a file over ftp between my computers, started browsing the web with firefox, when firefox stops loading my pages. Internet explorer doesn't work either, but I can ping anything, and Windows Live messenger works as well. My laptop is working fine, it's what I'm using now. I restarted my desktop a second time, and again, mozilla worked for about 5 minutes, then stopped loading pages again.

I've tried turning Windows firewall off, repairing my connections, resetting everything. I tried to use the Network Diagnostics that comes with XP, it worked a couple times, and a couple times it comes up with errors in different places saying the test failed because of a 'request timed out' from a ping attempt.

Also, just thinking about it, a number of programs have recently been unable to connect to the internet, though I attributed it to the network bridge that I didn't really know how to set up, but the couple programs that I was thinking of are now able to successfully connect, but firefox is unable where it was always able to connect before.

If there is any other information that is needed just let me know, and thanks in advance for the help.

Firewalls integrate themselves pretty deeply into the sys [well, comprehensive ones do...] along the lines of AV services. Always check for removal tools from the makers sites when wanting to unistall such services. Here is one such for you:
http://www.zonealarm.com.au/special_tools/ZA_CLEAN.exe
Run it, and let it restart the sys.

I am only a novice.
The wirless network device should be ADSL 2.0 and not DSL. DSL has security problems. ADSL 2,0 is also required when accessing internet via a bridge or other PC/laptop.

On each computer Type in run box in start pane (if visible)
CHKDSK /F
enter and restart
You get a screen at start up. Just let it run. Can take about 3 minutes depending on you HDD size and any other drives or partitions. Don't interrupt the disk checking.

If you are not using the printer port, ever, disable it. The Com port is used by power state even if its not being used, dont disable it. I'm still researching the use of unused com ports.
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