Over the last several months, I've been recovering my desktop from a
serious virus/rootkit infection.  At some point, I received an email
offering me a special offer on the latest version of WinZip (I had been
meaning to update it for some time) which would come with a copy of
Kaspersky Antivirus.  I placed my order and received a nice CD-ROM with
both products on it....

  Ultimately, I wound up restoring my system from the disks I had made
(whew!) and started to re-install my various applications, etc.  Fairly
quickly, I found that although I received an address from my router via
DHCP and could resolve Internet addresses via DNS and ping well-known
services.  I could not, however connect to anything -- not even the web
interface of my router.  I guessed I was probably missing one or more
network drivers, but I installed the drivers from all of the original
Dell disks I could find, and downloaded (on my netbook, to a USB drive)
all the drivers for my model from Dell's support site.  When none of
that worked, I wrote up the problem and sent it to PCBUILD as an
OS/networking issue.

  This weekend, I used the restore disks again, and started reinstalling
things and checking tio see if/when the problem reappeared.  It turned
out that Kaspersky Antivirus was the culprit.  I was able to restore the
ability to connect, bit by bit, by turning off various sorts of
protection within Kaspersky.

  I also found that when I tried to reinstall WinZip, it refused the
product key printed on the CD-ROM, saying that license was already in
use.  It was, of course -- for the same PC before the reinstall.  It's
*possible* that the connection problem was Kaspersky's
passive-aggressive response to the same misunderstanding.

  I've downloaded and installed the new version of the Zone Alarm
firewall which now offers antivirus too.

David Gillett


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