I always like to try the new software, and when I was at PDC last year I installed the Windows 7 PDC version natively on one of my laptops. No problems and when Beta 1 (Build 7000) came out, I decided to install it natively on my development machine. Never had a problem until yesterday – 3/21/2009.
I was working in Visual Studio 2008 and opened the Help file. I have it set to use Online help and was confused when it wasn’t displaying any pages. I started IE 8 beta to go to MSDN and that didn’t load. I then tried Firefox and got the same thing…no web pages. Ok, so maybe a reboot is in order – no affect. I checked Windows Update and the last update was on 3/19 with a Windows Defender definition file. I turned off Windows Firewall and disabled my ESET Nod32 Anti Virus and that didn’t help either. All the other machines on my network were fine.
I lost track of all the things I tried, but here is a list of things that were occurring
in “regular” mode, I could not access http, https or mail, but could ftp and ping
in “regular” mode the Network and Sharing Center showed full connectivity
in safe mode, I had full internet access – web, mail, ftp, ping
running a VPC of Win XP had full internet access
My great friend Rich Manley is an IT god and he couldn't figure out the issue. I then twittered another friend of mine, Stephen Rose, who is on the Windows 7 marketing team. He called me right back and asked a few questions, then said he would get me in touch with some of the devs. However, I have a project I'm working on and really had to get this fixed right away. Not wanting to do an entire re-paving of my machine, I decided to do an "upgrade" to Win 7 Beta 1. After 3 hours, and several reboots, I finished up with full internet connectivity again.
As soon as I was up and running again, Windows Update wanted to install 6 updates. I nervously let it do so, thinking at least I had a baseline to go back to if it crapped out again. Thankfully, that all worked out well.
The perils of beta software...
James