Question : new DSL connection giving major grief!

Hello.

I switched from Cable Internet (Shaw Cable) to DSL Internet (MTS Internet) three days ago. The first day was fine. I logged on my router to say what the tech guy changed. There is now a username and password for the PPPoE protocol. The DNS have changed. But other than that, all seems the same as before.

The second day, I attempted to reconfigure my Outlook 2003 accounts to reflect the change in email POP3 and STMP servers. But then, Outlook gave me an error that it could not access the email servers. The online tech support of my new ISP provider (DSL) suggested to disable Norton Anti-virus. But that did not fix the problem. Turns out I had to disinstall Norton altogether to solve that problem.

I could access my email. Great! Next I went to my ISP web site to download ZoneAlarm Suite that my ISP gives for free to their customers. After it said to reboot. Then a ZoneAlarm wizard said that it detected a network, and asked me if I wanted it trusted or internet. I think I answered Trusted. I never took notice of the IP address of that detected network.

After that, all hell broke loose! Outlook could not longer access the email servers, and much worse... my web navigators (IE or Firefox, regardless) can no longer access the Internet! Worse, the browsers cannot even access my router!!!

I use Windows XP by the way. When I went in the connections that XP has (START-Panel Control-Network connections), it still listed the connection icon, but now it says that there is a problem with it. When I look at the IP address, it gives some crazy number like 169.254.224.226. Whatever, some number that is way off. Also the mask is now 255.255.0.0, when it was 255.255.255.0 before. That change explains why I can no longer access the Internet, or even the router. Note that I have three computers. The changes I described here were performed on two of them; the other computer remains unchanged, and is the only computer that still works ok. Cross my fingers... if that third computer starts failing, I will have no computers left to read replies to this message!

To fix the problem, I thought of changing the IP address to a static one 192.168.1.10 and with the mask 255.255.255.0. Yep! Then the browser could access the router, but the web navigator still cannot access the Internet. Internet Explorer comes with a wizard that tries to fix the problem. It could not. It said something like 'Windows detected problems with the service layer i386p'. I rebooted the machine. Still the same troubles.

Any ideas what I should do now. Note that I tried to phone my ISP yesterday and today, but could never get through (too busy).
 
Jean

Answer : new DSL connection giving major grief!

All right.

Let's try this on one of those machines.
http://www.spychecker.com/program/winsockxpfix.html
Download, copy it over to one of them, run it and reboot.

Once it seems to be up and running, you should get an AntiVirus program on there as quickly as possible.

I use www.avast.com (free edition) and free.grisoft.com also has a free avg