Okay, this is driving me nuts.
After a brand new install of windows xp pro, I downloaded zone labs free edition from my broadband provider. Which worked fine, like it always has done for me. But then shortly after it prompted me to update, which I did... but then all I could get was 'system error please reboot'. Internet access was blocked, and the page displayed instructions for regaining access. Eventually I regained internet access by switching to the windows firewall, and not using zonlelabs.
However, I later got the 'internet access denied' message again, so this time I uninstalled zonelabs, renamed the internet log files etc, and carried on with the windows firewall. This seemed to work, but when I booted up my machine this morning I got the 'zonelabs denied internet access' message in my browser AGAIN, even though zonelabs is no longer installed !!
How can this be? And how can I fix it?
Another unrelated(?) problem
------------------------------------------- I've also got a problem with my hard drive, which is presumably unrelated, but is as follows: my hard drive was 40GB... and I was running a manufacturer-installed windows xp home edition. But after installing windows xp pro it went horribly wrong. Did a clean install and got a 'can't load operating system' error, or words to that effect. Ended up having to use my windows 98 cd just to get access to the pc and format the hard drive. Did that, installed windows 98, and then upgraded to win xp pro. But my hard drive has shrunk ! The 40GB hard drive was NTFS and when formatting via win 98 this had been confirmed and I'd said 'yes' to all the prompts about catering for that. But now, in win xp pro I'm rather alarmed to see that my hard drive is listed as being FAT32 and only
4.99GB !!I've gone into the windows disk managing tool, hoping to find a huge unallocated space I could partition or something, but instead I'm contradictory info... on the one hand I'm being told there's a whopping
149GB there, on the other hand the C drive is only 4.99GB and somehow takes up all this space. I'm really confused and don't know what to do next. The disk manager info is as follows: the lower half of the screen------------------------------------
- disk 0 basic 149.05 GB Online
- right click>properties I see partition style as master boot record mbr, capacity 152625GB Hard drive is named ST3160021AS with Microsoft drivers
the upper half of the screen
------------------------------------
- describes C as partition basic fat32 Healthy (System) 4.99GB Free Space 1.02GB 20% Free Fault Tolerance-no overhead 0%
- below it is my CD drive described as partition basic cdfs healthy etc
I'm at a complete loss... any ideas (preferably not involving floppy disks as I don't have a floppy drive) would be *very* much appreciated !