Gremlins in the (Windows) Machine

For the last several weeks, I encountered several networking issues on my windows laptop:

• My machine wouldn't connect to the network when I switched wireless access points
• The Apple Airport Utility on my machine wouldn't detect Airport devices and I couldn't print wirelessly using Bonjour
• I couldn't ping my computer from a different machine
• I couldn't see any flickr pictures

I was at a complete loss to figure out what was wrong. I tried resetting the winsock catalog, reinstalling airport utility, disabling the windows firewall, uninstalling spybot, unistalling windows sp3 and finally reinstalling windows sp2...all to no avail.

After exhausting all my search queries on the topic, I finally had the answer from an IT guy. I had enabled the option 'stateful firewall' on my Cisco VPN.



Disabling the option restored my machine and my peace of mind.

Hope this post helps someone else out there.