The classical personal firewalls, which would be installed on most personal computers in a typical Small Office / Home Office environment, block only specific network traffic. By default, they are open, and pass all traffic.
Modern firewalls, used by more cautious network experts, permit only specific network traffic. By default, they are closed, and pass no traffic. After installing this type of firewall, you must run a manager and configure the firewall to pass your desired traffic.
My suspicion is that the nVidia nForce hardware firewall falls in the latter category. If you don't run the firewall manager, it will pass only a minimum of traffic, probably just enough for you to surf to the nVidia website and get software upgrades. This intentionally blocks SMBs (whether NetBT hosted, or directly hosted), and protects against the dangers offered by Windows Networking. If you're going to use Windows Networking over TCP/IP, you must run the firewall manager, and intentionally configure it for Windows Networking.
Short of configuring the firewall for Windows Networking over TCP/IP, you have no choice but to install an alternate transport such as IPX/SPX or NetBEUI, which bypasses the firewall completely.
If you have the NVIDIA nforce networking controller with onboard LAN, you may have a "hidden firewall" interfering with your network connection. I'll describe my own situation and how I resolved the problem. I owe great gratitude to Chuck, frequent poster in this group, who worked with me for about a week, and had suggested the possibility of the NVIDIA "hidden firewall", but I was reluctant to accept that because, well, it really was hidden and I couldn't find it (and still can't). But it was there. (For those who want to review the original thread, it was posted in this group under the title "networking only works one way" on 08/04/06.)
Networking only works "one way", with only my part of the thread provided, because the Other Poster's content was not archived.
As the public becomes aware of spam, and more resistant to it, the spammers have to be creative. It may take 10,000 pieces of spam to get one hit (an actual inquiry from a possible victim), rather than 1,000 (as it might have, a year ago). Spammers started out sending email, but now they have adapted to changing times.
Some people have given up on email, for communication with anybody that they really care about. They will use an Instant Messenger for direct, real time communication with individual friends, and broadcast information of general interest by blogs or other websites. With Instant Messaging, you can choose, at any time, who is allowed to send you messages. With blogs or websites, you can selectively browse those belonging to people that you know. If you have a lot of friends, you can automate checking your friends websites using a syndication feed newsreader.
So rather than just sending out email, spammers, too, are using Instant Messaging, and blogs.
Now, the email system is rather old, and was originally designed with very little restrictions in the network. Every server that transports email will accept email from any server sending, and send to any server receiving. The reality of spam has necessitated changes in that philosophy, but basically, any restrictions are patches on top of a pretty spam friendly infrastructure. And email travels at a level not seen by most users of the email.
But with email spam being less productive for the spammers, they've had to send more spam to get the same amount of money. This is not a problem - spammers don't send email directly from their computer, they use botnets as email relays.
Blogs and Instant Messaging and websites, on the other hand, are much more obvious to the users. It's harder to get any volume of spam through either of those, so the spammers have to be creative.
One of the ways the spammers are being creative is handling Captchas. Now, even if you don't know what a Captcha is, I'm sure you've used one. If you've setup an email account, or a website, or posted a comment in a guestbook anywhere, you've had to deal with one.
A Captcha, or "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart", is a word puzzle, that "humans can solve, but computers can't". Generally, you'll see a set of 4 to 8 alphanumeric characters, jumbled and mangled, in a box, and you'll be asked to type those characters into another box. If you type the correct sequence of characters, you'll be allowed to do what you want to do, and open an email account (for instance).
So the spammers are using people to read the Captchas, and type the answers. And there's no shortage of people to do this, even as they don't realise what they're doing. Captchas are so common these days that any time we see one, and we're doing something intentionally, such looking at pictures of dancing pigs, we solve it, without thinking about what we're doing. In this case, we're helping the bad guys.
The spammer's program, while setting up another email account, is presented with a Captcha - as you are, when you setup an email account. The spammer uses you, and others like you, to solve the Captcha.
The spammer's computer takes a copy of a Captcha, which has been presented to it for solving, and displays that same Captcha on its website.
You surf to that website, which has a link
Check out the dancing pigs!
Eager to see the dancing pigs, you click on the link.
You see the request
In order to continue, please enter the scrambled text from box A into box B.
You obediently type the answer, so you can see the dancing pigs.
Your answer is compared with the others answers.
With any number of identical, independently provided, answers (from you and / or the others), that identical value is used as the answer to the captcha.
The spammers website routes the answer back to the email setup program, and on to the email setup server, as if an actual person had just intentionally typed the answer.
The spammer gets another email account.
You, and the others, get to see the dancing pigs.
Think this is fiction? See the Google video featuring Luis von Ahn of Carnegie Mellon Institute: Human Computation, and read about a commercial product that uses a script to bypass captcha protection.
For a description of an alternative technique for breaking CAPTCHAs, that uses lots of money and CPU processing, see Dancho Danchev's Blog: Spammers and Phishers Breaking CAPTCHAs.
a great example of the adaptation process
That would have to be some pretty unimaginative spammers, to spend mucho bux on a CAPTCHA breaking system, when they could just use folks who want to see dancing pigs. »http://www.youtube.com/v/tx082gDwGcM Human Computation (Luis Von Ahn: July 26, 2006)
One of the limitations of WiFi is that it's not scalable, and it has a finite capacity. You cannot get more than (currently) 108M bandwidth. You simply won't be able to stream the latest movie in 3D multi-colour to every media computer in your house without seeing some performance limitations. And that is your own performance limitation. If your neighbour has a WiFi LAN, you will also have to share the bandwidth with him (her). WiFi simply does not have unlimited bandwidth, new technology or not.
In any domestic situation with neighbours, for a problem like a loud stereo, the tendency is to turn your own stereo up. Crank that sucker. This is, however, not a good, long term solution.
You possibly have up to 8 immediate neighbours, and more beyond them. Some of those neighbours, also currently suffering from your neighbour stereo, now have to suffer from yours too.
Your neighbour will probably turn his volume up yet again, to overcome the new "noise" from your system.
Like every analogy, this one suffers from a major problem. With loud stereos, it's easy to find where the noise is. Just follow your ears. Then call the police, and have them deal with the problem.
If your neighbour has a "loud" WiFi LAN (ie SuperG or MIMO), you won't be able to follow your ears. Nor will, I suspect, the police be interested in becoming involved. You're going to have to find your neighbour, and you're going to have to convince him to turn his stereo (WiFi) down. Or suffer in silence.
You can start with NetStumbler, and triangulate the problem. Then, you'll have to use diplomacy, not technology. You'll not solve the problem by getting a high power AP.
I, and others like me, have seen this situation coming for some time. Here is one possible real life example, and here is a second possible real life example. And even if neither discussion is diagnosed with this cause, this scenario is coming. Channel saturation, and unexplainable intermittent bandwidth variation, will become the norm, not the exception.
One of the problems with Windows, in general, is its stability and security problems. One of the causes of stability and security problems is the need for Windows to support various versions of different software, its own as well as third party products.
Periodically, Microsoft issues rollup updates, which give it a baseline to work from when supporting their own product. SP2 was one of those rollups. By continuing to use Windows SP1, and by possibly encouraging others to do so, you are requiring useless complexity in Windows.
XP SP2 has been out for an extremely long time. Its time to put SP1 to bed, and prepare for SP3 or Vista, which ever comes first. As Windows customers move to SP3 or Vista, support for SP2 will continue. But support for SP1 should not.
Move to SP2. Windows is bad enough with it - its worse without it.
Having applied SP2, proceed directly to malware analysis. If you've been running with SP1 this long, you probably have something you're not aware of.
Now if you're reading this specifically because your computer has problems, but you already did malware analysis, yet you can't find the source of the problem, your computer may be now part of a botnet. In this case, the only solution is for you to "flatten and pave".
Immediately, disconnect from the network.
Repartition, and reformat the drive.
Re install Windows XP.
Upgrade to SP2, and all security patches.
Reconnect to the network.
I'm aware that this is brutal, and maybe rude, advice. But if you're advised any less, we're essentially saying
Look, you can solve your computer problems without upgrading to XP SP2. It's OK to run XP SP1.
But, it's not OK. Windows XP SP1 isn't supported by Microsoft, as of October 2006. Period.
When I got my laptop, it came with built-in WiFi, and with 3 programs ("Client Managers") to manage the WiFi connection.
HP - The laptop vendor.
Intel - The WiFi card vendor.
Microsoft - The operating system vendor.
The problem is, only one program can manage a WiFi card at any time. Multiple managers = confusion = random disconnects. Each Client Manager program will be different.
Information displayed.
Organisation of wizards to make settings changes.
Security options.
The Microsoft product, Wireless Zero Config, has one major advantage. WZC runs as a service. If you depend upon your computer having connectivity without you being logged in, or even immediately after you login, you may find this a useful feature.
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