Dear Microsoft: Thanks For Killing My Vista PC’s Internet Connectivity

I hope this doesn’t come out being rude. BUT with the hash that M$ has made with xp service pack 3, and vista overall. It may just be a good idea to download for network install, and then update 1 part at a time. This way you will know what “breaks” what. Did you look for error log files? was there any log file kept from the downloads and installs of the updates? I know that after your system restore use they would most likely be over written. But still.

If you don’t understand how poor QC is now at Microsoft, you just might be not paying enough attention.

In my house, of 9 PCs, we have one test machine, and after that one comes through unscathed after a Terrible Tuesday, we still make sure we do a restore point before the install on all other machines. BTW, none currently run Vista - we aren’t that brave, and I don’t have that much spare time.

has anything changed in dhcp?

try an ipconfig /all to determine if you’re getting the correct ip, netmask, and gateway info.

if it’s set correctly, can you ping the gateway?

I haven’t used Vista but can you kill the firewall like you can in XP?

Is there an internet setup in IE or Ctrl Panel that you can check to make sure it still knows where to `look’ for the internet?

Well, if you’re having trouble with Windows, why not switch to Linux, eh?

Same song, second verse for Windows XP times 4 on home office Lan. After 4 hours on phone with MS - nothing.

Uninstalls, resets, system restores - nothing allows IE or Outlook to connect - though the connections all show traffic.

Worst of all the updates killed my daughters laptop from connecting wireless.

Coming to you live from a MAC! Only system which is left working - a gift to my son for graduation.
Go figure.

Hi everybody — quick update. I played “Update Roulette” with Vista tonight, but selectively installed only three of the above updates to see what happened. I did “Update for Windows Vista (KB952714); Update for Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 Junk Email Filter (KB951476); and finally Cumulative Security Update for ActiveX Killbits for Windows Vista (KB950760).

Then I rebooted. Guess what, one of those three must be the Internet Connection Killer, because after restarting, I lost my Internet connectivity yet again. I rolled back to a trusted Restore Point, and my connectivity was restored.

I highly doubt it was the Outlook 2003 Junk Email Filter update that did this. Perhaps the it was the “ActiveX Killbits” update (isn’t that an interesting update name) or the innocent sounding “Update for Windows Vista”.

I can now repeat this phenomenon on demand. Why I’d want to do that, I don’t know.

What a cluster.

Not for sure why anyone is surprised. One of the first things I do in windows update is set any video drivers as do not show. I can not tell you how many times I have dumped and reloaded, then gone to MS Updates and killed the video with their update on video drivers. This has been going on for over a year with MS, and they still haven’t fixed it (Nvidia cards)

This problem with Vista isn’t surprising. Many times as in the past, the fix is worse than the problem.

I have a Dell Inspiron 531 that pulled the same auto updates overnight last night (June 11). When I got up this morning to read the email, the PC had rebooted and was working fine. I am obviously able to get to the Internet as well as other network resources after the PC/OS automatically downloaded and installed the same updates you mention. I wish I had some idea of what caused your problem. I suggest searching the individual updates and known issues with your type of system to see where the problem originates. I’m guessing it is probably something along the lines of the XP SP3 issue with OEM systems using AMD processors, but that is just a guess. Keep us posted on the results. This could be a nightmare released on us all.

Thanks for tips everybody — I’m going to continue to test to isolate the culprit.

I’ve already wasted hours of my valuable time, I feel like Microsoft should reimburse me. Seriously.

As for Linux, I’ve dabbled, but I use a certain set of tools (both hardware and software) and I can’t find Linux equivalents for all of them.

windows update installed those on my vista pc yesterday and didn’t just kill the internet, they actually stopped vista starting entirely! (black screen, but on hitting the display switch several times, a box appeared saying ‘interactive logon process failed to initialize, see system log for details’)

2 startup repairs later, everything was working fine again.

I hope lots of people have gone crying (or raging) to microsoft about this…

One more thing: everyone should dual-boot with windows and ubuntu. Or even better, just install ubuntu over the top! Or better still, get a mac!

Good luck

I feel your pain. This last round of patches caused remote desktop to quit working on my Vista Ultimate. I restored to a day prior to the patches and turned off auto update and so far all is well. GREAT JOB Micro$oft!

Look at the firewall settings in security center. I had a similar problem after updates to a W2k03 server. took quite a while to find what the problem was, and quite exasperating that the firewall settings would change on their own.

I’ve found Linux to be a lot less of a problem than Windows. They both have warts, But all in all, Linux is a lot more stable and dependable. It doesn’t hurt that there is so much good free software for Linux, That there is no antivirus running to slow it down, and that the system doesn’t get clogged with the latest and greatest malware of the week.

I still Windows installed on my laptops, but hardly ever use it unless I must. I had some initial trepidation until jumping into the Linux pool, and yes, the water was cold for a flash. But the water is great, come on in!

I got the same problem on my 10 month old Thinkpad T61. Vista update on 6/10 stopped Firefox and IE to connect to the internet. The network seems to be up, as I can ping other sites and Windows Media Player can connect. And Windows update installed Vista SP1 in the mean time (after the http connection was lost). Still no web connection after SP1.

Hey, your non-connecting internet is just a great LUCK comparing to my case. After the disasterous Tuesday night, my 11 month old ThinkPad T61 did not even boot up. For the last four days, I had to use the Vista Install disk to restore the computer before the automatic updates on Tuesday.
However, thanks to the AUTOMATIC updates including “Cumulative Security Update for ActiveX Killbits for Windows Vista (KB950760)” every night, I found my laptop losing the boot-up ability every morning.
Does Micro$oft have any conspiracy to take over the world by killing the computers?

I am having the same problem with XP machines. We believe the issue is with KB950759. When the computer reboots after installing the updates there is a problem with the network connectivity with Outlook and IE. There is a DOS command window which has to run and close. Afterwards everthing works great, problem is it takes about a hour to run. If you close the DOS window it never finishes and remains broken. I hope this helps.
JMB

Yes, I want to confirm that it is KB950759 that is causing a problem on my XP machine. It seemes to install fine, but when I launched IE7 it would not display any web pages. Same thing with Firefox. Uninstallation solved this problem. I will not “upgrade” to Vista, unless I experience a spasm of stupidity.

OK, I reinstalled KB950759 after first disabling my antivirus, antispyware and firewall (all Norton products). MY IE7 is now functioning normally, same with Firefox, even after security features reenabled. I suspect problem lies with firewall. I think that disabling security features before installing windows updates will prevent recurrence of problem.

[...] Wednesday (6/11/2008), I wrote a post about my Windows Vista PC having some major issues after auto-installing a batch of updates from Microsoft’s Windows Update service. [...]

I’ve had a PC with the exact same issue. I was unable to do a system restore as that feature was not workign ever. All I chould do was download SP1 from MS. After installing it, hey presto, IE works again.

Have a Dell running Windows XP Home SP2 with same issue, dead IE7 and FireFox, but LAN works. Was able to confirm KB950759 was the cause. After roll-back, duplicated the issue with a re-patch of KB950759, twice.

Do Have Trend Micro Internet Security 2007, this must be the cause… Shall try reinstall of path KB950759, with disabled Internet Security 2007.

I’ve found that here lately alot of things mess with winsock connections, firewalls and so on. A good cure all for that is netshell. Try this set of commands in CMD Prompt if you encounter this again.
netsh int ip reset reset.txt
netsh winsock reset
netsh firewall reset

and then reboot

you aint alone there, had since set the laptop not to pull the updates and install automatically. skype and yahoo messenger would work just fine but the problem arises when one tries to browse the net. uninstalling the updates works but i wonder if i’d ever be able to install any hot fixes and any other patches.

hmmmm…I have had the same prob with KB950759 (curse that stooopid update) however I have no idea about computers in there techno sence of the word, so I spent half a day with my provider and them telling me “its connected from this end” argh…the stress….so I went and spent 3 hours going thru all the updates, one at a time, and un/ and reinstalling…to find the problem…I was quite chuffed with myself because I fixed my comp, lol…but the stooopid thing is that I have to uninstall this update every 2 days so I can use my internet…how do I get rid of it completely????

I lost internet connectivity after windows updates on my XP..I had to do system restore and I am back online. 7/08/2008

I lost connectivity as well. Uninstalled the updates and all is well. I haven’t trusted Microsoft since the WGA fiasco. I keep auto updates turned off. Sad to say but it’s safer.

Exact same problem. My automatic updates last night downloaded the Malicious software removal tool KB890830. After that, my laptop would connect to my wireless router without difficulty, I’d have an IP address like any other day. But absolutely no internet connectivity whatsoever. So I simply uninstalled the KB890830 update through add/remove programs, and presto, internet was working again.

Quite annoying to have to constantly be investigating stuff like this.

I had exactly the same problem as described in the letter above when I tried to access the Internet this morning. I had network to my other two computers and they both had Internet access but my main machine was dead to the Web. I’m running XPSP2 on it. Overnight autoupdate installed KB890830. I did a system restore and now everything is fine again.

I did not install KB890830 (the malicious tool..) ‘cos autoupdate is off. I hit install manually but I got a complete license agreement which MS wants me to agree to. It’s for me the first time that an update (for Vista) asks of me to explicitly accept the conditions.. I am ‘just a user’ and have little knowledge of how software works. I always thought that, when MS says: ‘essential update’ or ‘important’ or ‘recommended’, that I better install it quickly.. Now, I’m confused: I don’t like this “do you accept?-update”…
Oh, actually, I also did not install the Silverlight-”update” in the past. ‘Cos I had/have a funny feeling about that one too…
Can I just ‘leave’ these two updates out and still use updates that I DO trust, in future?

I had the same problem and I’m running XP. I ended up doing a system restore to take it off and have told Windows update to shove it the last 2 times it tried to install the crappy update.

Definitely KB850759! Did a complete wipe of hard drive - everything ran great - all drivers, hardware, bios, etc updated. Installed everything through KB950759 and connectivity was fine. Once I installed KB950759 KABOOOM! This connection has limited or no connectivity…. take a screwdriver and shove it in your eye…. Oh wait…. I installed them one at a time because microsoft eats a fat D!%K and hurts our pc’s intentionally you say? This was definitely the culprit. No need to roll back though. Simply turned off windows firewall and connectivity came back… then installed zonealarm for a better firewall… hope this helps…

PS - Still running XP - I won’t run vista until I absolutely have to….

Not only does the updates wipe out your Internet connection, but if you have a wireless router installed, your router will NO LONGER be compatible with VISTA!!!

PS - I will be returning to XP.

One thing that everone is missing is that Microsoft and hardware manufactures also have rcommended driver updates. I work for the third largest computer company in the world as a tech. The updates may not work if the BIOS or hardware drivers are out of date. That is a end users responsibility to check for these as well. I have no problems at all with the updates ever.

Vista automatically updated itself this week (October 23) and wiped out my Internet web access! Grrrrrrrr. Big mistake buying Vista; it won’t work with my printer, camera software, etc., and now this.

I followed the uninstall method others here had used and after the 5th uninstall, “Service Pack for Microsoft Windows KB936330″, the Internet connection came back to life. Next day it was down again. Five reboots later it started working again. All drivers are now updated and lets hope it holds. When did we all have to become computer geeks in order to operate a PC? I like a previous post’s idea of billing Bill Gates & company for our time!

I think Bill Gates should be imprisoned.

Do what I did and get rid of vista. Microsoft has their nose too far up my ass for my comfort with vista I can only imagine what windows 7 must be like. I went back to windows xp. Much better and much smaller.

Microsoft sucks and google is right in line. They are too big for their own good. I would love to just have a computer and have it all mine without microsoft and google being up my butt.