Re: Panda's Thumb down?

On Sun, 11 May 2008 15:58:46 -0700 (PDT), Robert Carnegie
<rja.carnegie@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
<9dc280e5-ce78-4c09-9f78-fa98b8275fa7@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> :

Augray wrote:
On Sat, 10 May 2008 05:37:25 -0700 (PDT), Frank J <fnci@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote in
<e26cc290-5b6d-4423-b6ff-ef5bf4733bf9@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> :

or is it my computer?

When I click on the link or type in the URL, the computer (Windows
XP)freezes at least several minutes, and won't let me back out or
close the window. Ctrl-alt-delete kicks me off the Internet. Rebooting
didn't help.

Do you have Windows XP Service Pack 3 installed? I had suspiciously
similar problems accessing *some* webpages after installing it
yesterday. If you have Automatic Updates set to "Automatic" you may
have it installed without knowing it.

I found that I have to give "Generic Host Process for Win32 Services"
(AKA svchost.exe) automatic access through my firewall, which seems to
fix the problem. You can check whether you have Service Pack 3
installed by right-clicking on "My Computer" and selecting the
Properties option.

And why is this a good idea? Surely nothing gets to open the firewall
without a good reason?

Granted, there are viruses that have the same name, but since this is
also the name of the generic services process of XP, and since I
downloaded and installed the service pack manually immediately before
these requests started appearing, it seemed like a pretty safe bet
that they weren't virus related.


I agree that a browser shouldn't get locked up by a fault on a
website, but exploits against web servers are possible and can cause
sites to do bad things to browsers. I've seen lockup behaviour on
Internet Explorer 7 (but only locking IE itself) on the workplace
network working through a web proxy server which I suspect is running
an inappropriate name resolution method for browsing, maybe WINS
first, which doesn't seem to worry our net admin: it takes about a
minute to resolve a name, then it works efficiently for maybe five
minutes. That's a thought in fact: I haven't tried to get around it
with IP addresses.

I avoid IE if at all possible.


I usually browse with Opera, Javascript switched off

.