There's not enough bitching

[Jason_Miao]

I was thinking of posting what I'd done on my wuxia-ish fic just as a backup measure.  I hadn't backed up my hard drive in over a year, and I'd written quite a bit (for me, anyway.  DB Sommer probably writes about as much over his lunch break).  So I logged into soulriders and began typing.  Guess what crashed half way through?

(Incidentally, anyone have one of the old copies of the drafts I've sent out from time to time?  Fall?  MS?  Kwok?  It won't have any of the work that I'd done on Ukyou's role, or the really really blackmail weird scene I had in mind, but...)

[Dracos]

Ouch.  For the record, I tend to store backups of folks stuff that they want.  I have a pretty good low loss record.

Dracos

[KLSymph]

Microsoft's Guided Help application broke my computer's Winsock catalog instead of fixing it. I haven't been able to connect to IRC or the interweb from home for two days. My rage, it devours all.

UPDATE: I defeat Winsock, despite Microsoft, by reinstalling TCP/IP!

[Edward]

Hey, what do you expect from Micro$oft products?

Glad you got things fixed.

[Dracos]

Letting other things manage your network protocols is never good.

Dracos

[Brian]

Monday: Buyer's system crashes; by the time it's up again, orders have missed their deadlines (they won't ship out on schedule).  Store Manager then decides that I can send back another store's stock from an offsite this weekend, even though I do not have the required paperwork (they didn't ship it to our store in the first place...).

Tuesday: No incoming shipments, since we missed the deadline.  I spend the entire day hauling boxes (of an average weight around 45 lbs.) around to try and make room for the double-shipment that's coming in tomorrow.  Along with our warehouse shipment.  I manage to (no joke) lie, cheat, and steal to get the paperwork I need, since the receiver at the store the books actually arrived at doesn't like me, and won't fax over a copy (also, not a joke).

Wednesday: All three shipments arrive simultaneously.  After a grueling celebration of the annual Festival of the Pushable Cube, I realize I only make 10/hr.

Tomorrow: I come in late, because the company will not pay overtime, and they want me to run a book club in the evening (even though I've had 0 attendees for the last three meetings).  Did I mention there's still boxes that I wasn't able to receive today?  I have to take care of them, tomorrow's shipment, and I'm on a time crunch, and they want me to run a club....

[KLSymph]

Glad you got things fixed.

Apparently it was too early to call it "fixed". Originally, the problem was my internet connection got cut about ten to twenty minutes after a boot, which it wasn't a network problem since others on the network were going fine and my own mIRC was as well. I downloaded Microsoft's Guided Help, and when I first downloaded and ran it, it didn't work. Apparently it's a web application, so to run it you needed to be connected to the internet on the computer which doesn't connect to the internet, the issue that made you run the app in the first place.

*cough*WORTHLESS*cough*

Ahem. Sorry, something in my throat. I don't know, maybe the application wasn't actually a webapp but just decided to give me the "can't run this application right now" message during a time I didn't have an internet connection... for no reason. I mean, it doesn't make less sense.

After futzing with the Network Connection properties a bit (during which I found out about the Winsock issue), I ran Guided Help again during that 10-20min window after the boot. Guided Help tried to do what I eventually did manually, reinstall TCP/IP, except it stopped before it began reinstalling, saying it "couldn't find the next step". Okay... well, Microsoft being the brilliant bastion of programming that it is, I couldn't ctrl-alt-del to Task Manager to kill Guided Help and the rest of my programs weren't really responding either, so I rebooted.

Welcome to no connection at all! Winsock catalog corrupted, and not even mIRC would connect, which was a problem since I had figured at least I could run to #soulriders and beg for real-time assistance from somebody if nothing else worked out. Instead, all I get is a "cannot create socket" error.

Fast forward two days, as I was out of town anyway. I ran to a library computer, research networking, memorizing all those ipconfig and netstat and netsh command-line programs, learn to reinstall TCP/IP, did so, and back to the original 10-20min window. Which is a lot better than nothing. For some reason this fix began some sort of background process that was always running, slowing down my computer and making my mouse cursor show the hourglass all the time.

After that, a day or two of figuring out what's making my connection die. Thanks to Wickedfox and Fallacy for tips. I determined that it was Windows Explorer that was opening SMTP port-25 connections all over the place despite the fact that I don't think I've ever used SMTP email in my entire life, and it was exhausting my system's supply of connections so the system automatically locked down my network for security. After boldly failing to get my firewall to block port 25 (free firewalls don't have that capability, apparently), I just set the thing to block Windows Explorer. That stopped explorer.exe based connections, but svchost.exe not only stepped up to fill the void, but started doing it the instant I booted instead of waiting twenty minutes first. Argh!

As an aside, my computer suddenly, and it seems randomly, developed a harsh "blue screen and reboot the instant Windows begins" problem. I remarked during the beginning of the entire affair on IRC that I hadn't seen an actual blue screen of death for almost a decade, but in order to deal with this... let's just say I made up for that decade of absense. Oh, did I mention that this problem came along with a friend called "Windows freezes when it goes to Safe Mode"?

After dealing with... that, another hour or two with netstat was spent to figure out which program was running with svchost to multiply the SMTP connections, and finally today I determined that it was some nondescript DLL named isbzzxlnskm.dll. I don't know where it came from, since I don't download all that many programs, but whatever. After determining that this dynamicly linked library wasn't a system file according to the major infosites, well, I bet we can all imagine the level of extreme prejudice that went into expunging it. The murderizing required Unlocker and resulted in another Winsock corruption. Luckily, I'm already well experienced in diagnosing and fixing that, so TCP/IP was again reinstalled.

At the moment, I no longer have all the SMTP connections springing up, so I'll cautiously say that the internet has been properly restored. No hourglass either, so that was probably connected.

Unfortunately, I never definitively ended that blue screen issue, since I never figured out why it happened in the first place, so for all I know, the saga may continue yet. Although I find it ironic that the blue screen consistently pops up whenever I try to scan my system with Spybot or Ad-Aware, and that it began appearing on startup when I installed ZoneAlarm (which starts itself on startup). I don't know if it's because those programs are doing deep scans and the activity is making my computer hiccup, or if some malware on my computer is in fact actively detecting these anti-malware programs and rebooting to protect itself. Heck if I know.

On the bright side, I never found the time to learn networking like I wanted to years ago, and I guess this whole affair gave me a shot in the arm on that.

[Dracos]

That sounds like you had a nasty virus/trojan.  Specifically one that was probably using your system as a mailing machine.

Dracos

[KLSymph]

The idea did cross my mind, especially after the thing began spawning more and more .dll files with similarly random-string filenames in my Windows/system32 folder. After sweeping all of those out, it began spawning random-number .exe programs instead. And all the while, I still have some sort of driver error that bluescreens me about once a day.

But I can sort of manage this at the moment.

Update: Arrange files by modified date was useful for finding those .dlls and .exes, and it looks like I now found wincom32.sys (which is in fact a Trojan) as the specific problem. I figured as much, since every time I glanced over it while looking for those other executables I found myself squinting at it and wondering why I've never heard of this .sys file.

[Anastasia]

Today's Bitch: Being too tired to do anything but doze before bed. Bleh. I wanted to do something besides be a chair lump, but I got a wicked case of the sleep sands at work, and it stuck like hell.

[Dracos]

*nods*

Waking up blindingly early doesn't help either @_@

[Brian]

Not being able to afford to replace your ailing computer.

[Dexie Oblivion]

I've bred at least 40 Shroomish recently, and not a damn one has an Adamant or Jolly nature.

[Anastasia]

Waking up with a sore back can blow me. Stupid new mattress.

[Ragnar]

I feel your pain on that one, Dune. The cat got locked in the bedroom and peed on my old mattress, so I had to go get a new one. I'll get used to it eventually, I'm sure, but for now I keep waking up frequently in the night.