Eureka, I solved my OWN PC problem (for a change;-)

It's always a triumph when you find the source of a baffling PC problem all by yourself.

I'd noticed for a few days through the ZoneAlarm traffic icon that I was getting a lot of constant outbound traffic, ALL the time.

Uh-oh, I thought - the folks who go looking for free WiFi had started slurping my bandwidth by the megabit. I ran spyware programs - nothing. I ran Shields Up! from Steve Gibson - great lil program - and it said "hey, you are one STEALTHED PC!" Cool! So what was going on?

I have a Maxtor One-Touch external 100Gig hard drive that uses Dantz Retrospect HD backup software. That, too, was acting up - hanging and unable to show my restore points. I figured the two problems were connected somehow, but the first efforts to find stuff on either company's Website were fruitless.

Tonight, I tried squelching any nefarious WiFi users by trying the MAC filtering on my Linksys. Took some futzing - but nope, the traffic still was going hot and heavy, outbound only.

So I went back to the Maxtor Website and finally found answers to my questions - it appeared it was either .NET Framework 2.0 (an "optional" update I should have skipped - it's NOT the first time .NET Framework has given me grief over the years) or ZoneAlarm itself that was causing my grief.

I futzed with ZoneAlarm for a bit, but then uninstalled .NET Framework 2.0, which apparently restores it to 1.1 with hotfixes (since those also are in Add/Remove Programs). One reboot later, the external hard drive was just fine and I was seeing ZA in my task tray, not a solid green bar.

Basically, the Retrospect Express software uses .NET to communicate, over TCP/IP. So it got stalled on the newer version and was screaming at itself, or something like that.

I couldn't fix my own car if I had to. I leave back-breaking (oy, I've had pains there in recent weeks) jobs like a wonderful new paint job inside our home (and crown moulding!) to the pros (and pay what it's worth.) But once in a while, it's nice to solve my own tech problems, without even needing my brother Pete, the tech-wiz of the family, or my friends who were too busy to lend a hand.

I don't blame ZoneAlarm - in fact, it gave me a clue something was amiss. And Maxtor's site DID have the answer, once I really started looking for it.

Huzzah!!!;-)