My family works from our home for a company in another city. Yesterday, someone from the main office came over here to install some VPN software on some of our computers so we could access the office network. Unfortunately I couldn't be here some of the time that he was working, and now we've got a problem.

One of the computers got hung up on some portion of the VPN setup - I'm not sure where, how or when. Now, not only can we not reach the VPN from that computer, but we also are not able to access the Internet from it.

The computer can access files across our LAN just fine. It sees and can be seen by all other computers on the LAN. But, it won't use the LAN Internet connection, although all the other computers do.

I've checked the IP and DNS settings, uninstalled and reinstalled the network drivers, and removed the two extra network connections that were set up during my absence. I also checked the computer's network identity and made sure it was part of the correct workgroup. Finally, I also checked our router settings to see if it was somehow blocking Internet access for some local IP's. Everything checked out fine. As I said, the LAN is functioning perfectly, but this one computer cannot access the Internet.

One very strange aspect of all this is that I can ping our router from that computer, but I can't access the router's configuration setup through the browser. I can't figure that out; I can get to the router from all other computers on the LAN, and since I can ping the router from the problem machine, I would think I could load its config through the browser, too. But I can't.

The only other bit of relevant information I can think of is that no other computer on our LAN is able to access the Internet either, while using the VPN connection. That's expected, however, and disconnecting from the VPN allows the other computers to access the Internet just like usual. My guess is that, somehow, the VPN software and connection was partially and transparently set up before the process got hung up, and now there's no obvious way to get rid of it. Kind of like trying to uninstall a program when the uninstall file is corrupted...

Oh, I've also tried the obvious steps of rebooting, logging on as a different user, etc. None of that worked either.

Anyway, I'll really appreciate any pointers on this problem. The guys at the main office are as clueless as I am about what might be at issue here. We've checked everything we know to check. Some fresh ideas will be very welcome.

Thanks in advance,

Matthew
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Sounds like something is acting like a proxy server on your systems.

Have you checked your browser settings to make sure that the vpn software didn't also create a proxy server configuration?

That's guess one.

Seeing the network doesn't actually tell you much on a windows network since I don't think windows networking uses tcp/ip, which is what you use to connect to the web.

My guess is that the vpn software takes control of the tcp/ip stuff at a level right below the browser. Normally that would be something like the etc/hosts file, which you should check, or acting like a proxy server. Check the browser connection section, advanced usually, to see if the stuff is going through a proxy server.

After that it gets harder, the vpn software could simply have corrupted the tcp/ip drivers, it's hard to say for sure. Bad software can be very nasty.
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Hi, thanks for the tips. I'd actually tried everything but the tcp/ip drivers but forgot to mention some of it. In the end, I tried to reinstall the drivers and wound up corrupting the partition table for the hard drive. Had to wipe it clean and start with a whole new W2K installation...what a pain. That will teach me to let someone else work on computers under my control when I'm not around to superintend! ;)

Thanks again for your help though. I just don't understand how something as simple as VPN software could cause these kinds of problems.
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Ha ha... any software written by incompetents can seriously mess up your system, and since this software dealt with the tcp/ip stack at some level, it messed up that part of your system.

Norton Antivirus / 'internet security' [sic] for example can seriously mess up your computer, that's a big company. But they hired hacks to do their programming.

There are good programmers, and there are bad programmers, then there is a huge mass of mediocre programmers.
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