Internet randomly stopped working

[AdamAnubis]

On my dads XP machine, he has been using internet fine for months, but the internet has suddenly stopped working. It's not the SP as i am on it now on my vista machine (obv), and nothing has been changed to the router settings etc (manually anyway). Just want some advice really, I have no idea what has happened :/

Have tried system restoring, but to no avail, might try setting it back further but i doubt it will work. There was a brief flicker of life as it came up with 'Java updates are available' but then went again without any why or anything. I'm really stumped, without formatting the HD or reseting the entire network i dunno what to do

[TAKTAK]

have you just done a windows update?

i'll tell you which one to uninstall when i have found it...

edit: in fact if you've tried a sys restore then... hmm.... spec list?
try installing the chipset drivers again.

do you have zonealarm installed?

[AdamAnubis]

Yeah there was a windows update that installed that he says it has happened since, but i never trust windows update and when it finished it just came up with 'No changes made' - again a reason i don't trust it
I don't think it would be hardware as it was working prior to the update. Its fairly old.
6600GT, 1GB ram, not sure beyond that, possibly still running DDR. Its an AMD cpu, no idea which one though.

[TAKTAK]

HERE if you have zonealarm on the system

[AdamAnubis]

hahaha, How did you guess? I lost my liking for that program when it said it had no plans to support 64 bit systems. I'll have a gander and see if i can fix it.

[Templar87]

Setting the ZoneAlarm "Internet Zone Security" to Medium re-enables internet access - although (obviously) there is reduced security as a result :-(

[solar975]

I used to have ZoneAlarm on Vista but decided to bite the bullet and switch to ESET Smart Security recently. This has a firewall in it and I have no complaints so far.