I think news.gpick.com is gone forever and that was a great group for atguard diehards so I am wondering if anyone is still sticking with this great little firewall that just won't die? :-)
On Windows 2000 we found out in May 2005 or so that the SP4 update and rollup broke atguard. After alot of research and experimentation the issue was narrowed down to the TCPIP.SYS driver located in \\winnt\\system32\\drivers
I did alot more experimentation and found that the issue was the driver version. sp4 = tcpip.sys 5.0.2195.6706 = death for at-guard They changed some of the internals and atguard can no longer "hook" properly onto it.
so here is a quick AT-Guard win2k sp4 fix
get this file from microsoft: ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/bussys/winnt/winnt-public/fixes/usa/NT40/hotfixes-postSP3/teardrop2-fix/tearfixi.exe
extract all files from tearfixi.exe using WinRar or similar (exe will refuse to install directly onto a SP4 setup because of newer tcpip.sys)
right click on extracted .inf file and select INSTALL you won't see anything happen except for a brief explorer refresh
restart pc and viola, at-guard should work again. Optionally you can manually replace the tcpip.sys file under DOS or recovery console.
Now the problem with doing this is that tcpip.sys is rolled back to a version from a couple years ago (5.0.2195.5267) and that there have been alot of patches since then, some for very serious security reasons, other to fix load, SMP and crash issues. There are newer versions available that should work, but none that are instantly downloadable from Microsoft. Here's a list I have compiled of post-SP3 hotfixes that have newer TCPIP.SYS if you can get them (microsoft now charges for win2k hotfixes since it's not officially supported anymore)
Last version I can find mention of that *should* work with at-guard 3.22:
If anyone has the above and can post on the web or attach here somehow, it would be a great service to the atguard community.
other candidates:
As of December 2005, the newest TCPIP.SYS for win2k is: Tcpip.sys 5.0.2195.7049 12-May-2005 10:25 320,176 however this one will still definitely not work with at-guard