A Consuming Experience

Problems trying to connect a Microsoft Windows Vista computer wirelessly to the Internet via a BTHomeHub router? The "Limited connectivity" or "No connectivity" message, with no ability to connect to the Net at all from the Vista computer (even though the computer seems to connect to the Home Hub), may be all too familiar to you. But there's no help for this on the BT Broadband Vista support page.

It seems lots of people using BT Total Broadband as their ISP via the BT Home Hub have had this problem. So a tip, in case it saves you some troubleshooting - it may not just be the wifi, but a combo of Vista and BT's Home Hub (more specifically, a firmware "upgrade" to the HomeHub), so that the hub won't assign the PC an IP address.

Some people seem to have sorted it by resetting the Home Hub (press and hold the grey "Wireless Association" button at the back of the HomeHub, towards the bottom of the right; for newer Home Hubs, reset to default buttons are on the side) - as BT say, you then have to reactivate BT Broadband Talk again, if you use it.

I solved the problem for a friend who recently got a new Vista Home Premium laptop, where the issue seemed to be that "In Windows Vista, the BROADCAST flag in DHCP discovery packets is not disabled. Therefore, some routers and some non-Microsoft DHCP servers cannot process the DHCP discovery packets".

I sorted it by trying the step by step instructions to edit the Vista computer's Registry set out by Microsoft in "Windows Vista cannot obtain an IP address from certain routers or from certain non-Microsoft DHCP servers", as pointed out by this page.

Now all that stuff may seem like gobbledygook to you (and indeed me), but if you want to try it too, just follow the instructions in the previous link, making sure you backup your Registry first and also know how to restore it if need be (and I disclaim all responsibility if anything goes wrong and your computer stops working, so don't say you haven't been warned! You could also use Vista's System Restore feature to manually create a system restore point immediately before you try delving into the Registry and, if all goes wrong, boot the computer into safe mode and go back into System Restore and choose your restore point, to roll things back to where they were).

You'll see from the steps on the MS page that you're supposed to navigate in your Registry to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services
\Tcpip\Parameters\Interfaces\{GUID}

Then you're told to "click the (GUID) subkey that corresponds to the network adapter that is connected to the network" and add the new DWORD as instructed (on the Edit menu, point to New, and then click DWORD (32-bit) Value; in the New Value #1 box, type DhcpConnEnableBcastFlagToggle, and then press ENTER; right-click DhcpConnEnableBcastFlagToggle, and then click Modify; in the Value data box, type 1, and then click OK; close Registry Editor).

In case it helps, here are some screenshots with the key paths to navigate down outlined in red:

You'll need to scroll down quite a bit under Services to find Tcpip and the rest. Here's what it looks like after creating the new DWORD (with the new DWORD highlighted on the right - and you can copy/paste the DhcpConnEnableBcastFlagToggle for the name if you prefer, for greater ease and accuracy - exactly as it is, upper and lowercase):


Now to clear up one possible source of confusion for non-techies. There's nothing that says "{GUID}" under Interfaces. That's because "GUID" is just an indicator; what it will actually read isn't "GUID".

There are three sub "folders" (subkeys) under Interfaces, and their names are just a string of letters and numbers enclosed in curly brackets - the pic above shows what they were called on my friend's computer, but yours may be different. It'll be one of those.

So how do you know which is the right subkey? In my case the first one was pretty empty when I clicked on it, so I thought I'd try the other two first, as they had lots of stuff on the right saying "DHCP" (which I figured meant it had to be one of them, given that the issue is related to DHCP!).

I thought one of them must be the network adapter for the wi-fi connection, and the other one must be for the Ethernet network connection as the computer had an Ethernet port for connecting to a network with a cable. You need to tweak the setting for the wi-fi adapter. I wasn't sure which was which, so I added the DWORD for both of them (obviously do that yourself at your own risk!).

For me, this fix worked to solve the "limited connectivity" problem on my friend's PC. The Vista computer was then able to go on to the internet, surf Web pages etc with no issues at all, after that.

Note on Vista firewall and security

NB - also don't forget to set the computer's firewall to allow outgoing connections to the Net from your main browsers and other applications that need internet access. I also downloaded and installed the free Vista Firewall Control for my friend, as a firewall is absolutely essential now if you have a computer (especially a Windows one) and are using the Net, even if it's only for a few minutes.

As the article I linked to explains, a firewall is no good unless it watches not just incoming Net traffic, but also outgoing traffic - because you could have inadvertently installed a trojan or other malware thinking it was fun or useful free software, but behind the scenes it's actually sneakily going out from your PC to the internet, reporting all sorts of info about you or your computer to the bad guys, and maybe even enabling them to take over your computer without your suspecting a thing.

Windows XP's firewall is only one-way, blocking incoming connection attempts but not outgoing.

With a two-way firewall, whenever software on your computer tries to access the Internet the firewall should stop it, alert you as to which application is trying to do what, and ask you what to do - normally, either let it through all the time (in or out or both) if you trust it, so it won't keep asking you again each time it tries to access the net, or let it through just once, or always block it. Obviously your web browser and email programs need to access the net, but freebie software from someone you've never heard of shouldn't need to (e.g. a graphics program), unless it's to check for an update, and even so I prefer to block those and manually check for updates myself, just in case it's pretending to check for an update but in fact it's doing something else.

Now Microsoft claim their Vista firewall is two-way, but the outbound-checking part is inexplicably turned off by default, and it's not at all easy to find and configure.

So installing something like the free Vista Firewall Control, which greatly simplifies the process, is a no brainer if you care about the security of your computer and your information on it:

Labels: BT, computers, internet, Microsoft, security, technology, troubleshooting, Windows

Here's a tip to save you hunting for the solution to fix this "Windows no disk" problem in Windows XP (UPDATE: a commenter says changing the drive letters works in Vista too), at least if it's to do with your card reader, or CD or DVD drive.

UPDATE - summary added, history moved to end: This problem seems to be caused either by malware (virus or spyware etc), or by software following a Windows update or some other software installation or uninstallation (particularly HP, Norton or QuickTime software) trying to check for removable media that isn't there (e.g. disc in DVD drive or card in card reader), when it shouldn't be doing that check.

So if you get this error message, try these steps (UPDATE - in whatever order you like, bearing in mind 5 is probably a less than satisfactory last resort, but by all means try 4 before 2 if you prefer):

1. scan your computer with a virus checker and anti-spyware etc - try more than one product (e.g. there's also NOD32 ESET), clean any infections and reboot
   
   
2. if that doesn't work, try changing your drive letter assignments as shown in the step by step howto below - this works for lots of people
   
   
3. if that doesn't work, try uninstalling your floppy drive as shown below - or just always keep media in all your drives, though the next two steps are preferable if they work
   
   
4. then try making your software stop looking for drives: e.g. uninstalling and reinstalling an upgraded (or latest possible) version of QuickTime; similarly with your Norton and HP software if you have any, and clearing your most recently used documents or files lists
   
   
5. last resort: make the error message go away. This doesn't fix the problem, it addresses the symptom not the cause, so it really is a last resort if you can't fix it any other way, but if you're being driven mad, it's better than nothing.

So here's a step by step howto for the various suggestions above.

How to change your drive letter assignments in Windows XP to fix the "Windows - no disk" etc error message, and how to uninstall your floppy drive

There are Microsoft instructions but I think the following is quicker (UPDATE: this is closer, though the problem doesn't just apply to Zip drives configured as drive C. The steps below do reflect its solution - but I think having screenshots makes it easier for people to follow). I have XP SP2, hopefully it's not much different for SP1. I gather both XP Pro and XP Home can suffer this problem too. The steps below are probably trying to get at the same thing as uninstalling the USB drives, but much less frightening and more effective.

1. UPDATE: First, make sure all your removable drives or removable media drives are already connected to your computer (they don't have to have media in them). On your desktop, rightclick My Computer and choose Manage:
   
   
   
2. In the window that opens up, choose Disk Management.
   
   
   
3. Wait for the right hand side of the window to show up properly, it may take a few seconds. You'll see something like this:
   
   
   
4. My mistake was to rightclick the stuff in the top right hand bit. Don't you do the same! Check out the bottom right hand quarter, see the pic above, and scroll down in that mini window (see the mouse above) till you find the first drive that says "Removable media" and No media". Right click its name (e.g. "Disk 3") then pick "Change Drive Letters and Paths":
   
   
   
5. Click Change:
   
   
   
6. Then in the dropdown list pick a different drive letter (I'd use one somewhere near the end of the alphabet like R, just in case):
   
   
   
7. Then click OK to save the changed assignment. Rinse and repeat for all the other removable drives in the bottom right hand window which have no media in them. Do the same even for the card slot/drive that does have a card in it (if it does), just in case. Obviously each one must have a different letter. In my case I changed drives G, H, I and J to R, S, T and U. Strong warning - although BeckhamSquared did it, I really, really wouldn't change ANY of the drives to C. Leave drive C well alone, don't change it. (It shouldn't let you, but just in case...)
   
   
8. Then reboot, and with any luck it should work to kill that error message once and for all. It certainly did for me. And if you then want to change the drive letters back to what they were, do so by all means - but at your own risk, in my view if it ain't broke don't fix it (hopefully changing them back shouldn't muck it up again, but you never know).
   
   See also 9 and 10 below if that didn't work for you.
   
   
9. If it's still coming up with the same error and you can tell (from the sounds it makes - well I can) that it's trying to access your floppy drive, the above method won't let you change drive A. But what you can do is try this (at your own risk!): rightclick My Computer, choose Properties, Hardware, Device Manager, expand both Floppy Disk Controllers and Floppy Disk Drives, rightclick Standard floppy disk controller and Uninstall, and do the same Uninstall for Floppy disk drive if necessary. Reboot your computer, and it should reinstall the disk drive A. And hopefully also fix the error message for good. But if that doesn't work don't blame me!
   


10. UPDATE: This isn't a fix, just a workaround, but if changing your drive letters doesn't work try always having a disk or card in all your removable media drives i.e. floppy drive, CD or DVD drive, all your card reader slots. Or try the software fixes or "last resort" registry edit, below.
    

Or is it QuickTime, Norton or Hewlett-Packard or other programs?

If all that doesn't work for you, well the other thing I did was uninstall QuickTime, which I'd updated recently and which apparently did the trick for some people when they uninstalled it. Similarly for HP and Norton software.

But it's a bit more drastic than the above, so I'd try changing drive letter assignments first.

UPDATE: As it's probably software trying to look for media in drives when it shouldn't, you could also attack the problem by trying to stop your software looking for it, as per this comment - and uninstalling & reinstalling QuickTime or clearing its cache etc is certainly one way to help in this regard.

You could therefore also try clearing your recent documents or recent files lists in Word, Excel (go to the Tools menu, Options) and your other programs that keep lists of recently opened files. And also, generally in Windows, I'd suggest you try clearing your most recently opened documents list from the Windows start menu by trying these steps (instructions are for XP):

1. rightclick the Start menu
2. choose Properties
3. go to the Start Menu tab, make sure that Start Menu is selected, click the "Customize" button near it
   
4. go to the Advanced tab
5. click the "Clear list" button
6. click OK and OK again.
   

(I didn't mention clearing those lists previously because it didn't work for me, but it's worth trying if the above didn't work for you.)

Last resort - just make the error message disappear

I've also seen as a last resort this suggested registry change (XP only, don't know if it works in Vista). I didn't need to try it so I haven't done it but it's worked for others. However as the writer warns, it's really a last ditch solution because it doesn't stop the problem from happening, it just makes the error message go away, and ideally you should try to address the underlying cause of the problem.

UPDATE: But if you aren't comfortable editing your registry manually then:
- try clicking this link to do the same thing (NB before doing that backup your registry or that key first, and it's at your own risk etc!): stop windows no disk error message (click Run in the next dialog box). You shouldn't need to reboot.
- and try this link if you want to reverse that registry change later: reverse stop windows no disk error message.

UPDATE: I've moved the history to the end and beefed up the howto at the start.

History of solutions tried - skip this unless you're interested in the problem solving steps!

If the above error message sounds familiar to you, if it's been driving you mad, well me too. It's been killing me this last fortnight. Whenever I booted my Windows XP computer, it would come up and I'd have to hit Cancel (or Continue) several times in a row before I could get it to go away. (Tip: a few apps did seem to carry on starting up in the background. If I just left my PC alone and let them do their thang before I finally clicked Cancel or Continue, that annoying irritating slowing-me-down error message wouldn't crop up again. But I'd still have to get rid of it at least once). And unlike some other people, I did not have anything but my main hard drive as C.

That kind of incomprehensible gobbledygook of a computer error message doesn't exactly follow good design guidelines for exception messages, does it?

I tried all sorts of things. If regular readers are wondering why I've not blogged much this weekend, when the weekend is usually the time when I get down to my ACE posts, it's because I've been tearing my hair out hunting for and then trying different options I'd seen other people say had worked for them (so I can blame them for all the ones that didn't work for me!).

What was the problem? Checking removable media drives for media that ain't there

It's obvious that something had changed to make the problem start in the first place. It could be a Windows update (helloooooo Microsoft are you listening?), but to be fair it could have been an upgrade to some other software that caused it. For example lots of people have had difficulties with HP computers or HP software, and I have an HP printer myself with HP Solution Center, so that would have been one of the things I'd have tried next (upgrading the HP software e.g. HP ImageZone), if this one hadn't worked. For other people it's something to do with Symantec Norton software. For yet others it doesn't happen on turning on their PC, but only on launching certain software, or using certain hardware. We don't care if it's a bug, a conflict etc, we just want it to stop!

A very common thread though is that it often seems to involve drives for removable media. Some software process (which I wasn't able to track down, myself) has clearly been initiated at startup which was trying to access or at least check all the disk drives attached to my PC. It's not finding something that it was expecting to find - whether a CD, DVD etc in a CD-ROM drive, DVD-ROM drive or Zip drive for some people, or in my case cards inserted into all the slots of my card reader (which enables me to transfer photos, MP3s and other data from SD cards, Compact Flash cards etc to my computer and vice versa). Hence it's throwing up the error message. At one point it even seemed to be checking for a floppy disk in my floppy disk drive.

In my own case, I found that if I didn't have my card reader connected permanently, I didn't get that error message. I could plug it in later. So I knew it was to do with the card reader.

But the message came back if I'd left it connected when I booted again, so that wasn't much good if you don't feel like always having to remember to unplug and re-connect it (and it may be impracticable if the socket is somewhere inaccessible).

Also others have found that if you leave media in the drive that's causing the problem, e.g. a CD in your CD-ROM drive, or a floppy in your floppy drive, etc, that also stops the error message. But to me that's just a workaround, it doesn't solve the problem.

So, it's looking for disks etc that aren't in drives. Now one way to stop that is to stop it starting up at all, but I couldn't figure out what it was and I'd wasted the whole weekend trying other stuff, man, troubleshooting to try to solve problems that shouldn't be there in the first place is the worst waste of life I can think of.

Here's what I tried that didn't work, for light relief, so you can point at it and have a good larf - "Hahahaha, that would never have worked, why'd she do that?!!":

• uninstalled all my USB devices (including card reader) in Device Manager - scary, and stupid of me as I went too far in my panic and uninstalled other stuff that weren't removable media drives at all (see below), and I had to find a driver disks for one of them when I rebooted as it wouldn't reinstall properly! Lucky I still had it and it didn't take too long to find. But still.
  
  
• uninstalled my floppy disk drive (actually I think it did fix part of the problem, as it stopped trying to access my floppy drive, but not the rest of it as I still had a card reader - see below)
  
  
• cleared the QuickTime cache.

Now, what did work? Yeah I know you should do things one step at a time and reboot, but by the time I reached that point in the evening, I'd given up. So I tried two things at the same time, then rebooted.

I'm pretty sure I know which one it was that did the trick, as Kirk (thanks Kirk!) had pointed me to it earlier, and that man is always right - but I didn't think it had worked at first, only because I hadn't done it properly even though I'd seen the same suggestion elsewhere in my hunting. So I'll set out the solution below for those who like me might have missed it.

The thing I did which I'm pretty sure is the solution was to change the drive letters for my card reader slots - thank you BeckhamSquared, who said: "in resetting the drive letter whatever got corrupted during the [Norton removal] was fixed". (The person there first encountered the problem after uninstalling Norton SystemWorks. I didn't uninstall it myself, yet I also got the same problem - there are clearly lots of different causes).

At first I did it wrong because, foolish me, yeah I can laugh now, I only changed the drive letter for a removable card drive which did have media in it. Duh and double duh and triple duh. I should have changed the letter assignments for the empty drives, as they were the ones that weren't being detected. So I did that, after like the zillionth unsuccessful reboot, and yay - it worked!

(I'm giving this post the stopirritatingme tag in honour of Tom Morris!)

Labels: computers, Microsoft, technology, troubleshooting, Windows

Spybot-S&D (Spybot Search & Destroy) by Patrick Kolla via Safer Networking, is essential antispyware software to have if you have a Windows computer, in my book. It's free for personal use, though donations are welcome, and I've certainly donated.

Version 1.5 was released on 3 September 2007, and Windows users would do well to upgrade to or download Spybot 1.5 ASAP (see changes from v 1.4). I check for updates and run anti-spyware, anti-adware and anti-virus programs at least once every week, and Spybot should be in every Windows user's arsenal. The only time I caught spyware infections (from web browsing, I think) it was because I skipped my usual checks one week, but Spybot spotted and eradicated them quickly.

IE helper - SDhelper

The only slight bugbear I had with Spybot was the resident "IE helper", an Internet Explorer plugin known as "SDhelper" and captioned "Bad URL Blocker". On Internet Explorer 7, after I updated Spybot a window started constantly popping up (sometimes more than once) with a DoubleClick ad warning window everytime I went to a new page on sites like the Streetmap and Amazon's US and UK sites.


No amount of selecting "Always react this way" then clicking "Deny" seemed to stop it, although the nth time I tried that on Amazon UK with "Ignore parameters" unticked it stopped popping up on later pages. It since popped up again on Amazon, though.


I couldn't find any documentation or help on SD helper except mention in the Spybot Help that it helps block bad stuff in IE ("Currently, it consists of a browser helper for Internet Explorer that will block download of files known as malicious (spyware installers for example)") as a second layer of protection after IE. I don't know what "Ignore parameters" is all about, for instance. The Help says you can view a report of blocked pages or files, but I couldn't see any info in the report of what nasty thing it is DoubleClick was trying to do on Amazon and Streetmap, which SDhelper blocked - in fact the only reports in the Resident view were of things TeaTimer did rather than things SDHelper did.

As of the date of writing I have found zero hits on Google for spybot "ignore paremeters" and "ie helper" "ignore parameters". Of course, in a day or two you might well get one hit on Google namely this post, but that won't be of much help...!

I couldn't find any settings within Spybot if you want to change or refine the settings for a particular "Bad URL", either. But I was missing something, certainly it's keeping track at the bottom of the pop-up window of how many URLs it's detected altogether. At first all it seemed you could do is turn SDhelper on or off (it's in Tools in the Resident section. If you can't see it initially click on Tools, then the Tools heading in the left sidebar again, then check the "Resident" box, then click Resident in the left sidebar, and you'll see the checkbox to enable or disable SDHelper).


UPDATE: But I've since figured it out. You configure bad URL blocking in Internet Explorer, not in Spybot - via the IE Tools menu, there's a Spybot - Search Destroy Configuration option:


Change the Settings to "Block all bad pages silently" and voila, it'll still block "bad" URLs but no more constant popups. I think on upgrading to version 1.5 it must have set the configuration to "Ask" by default when it used to be silent. Sorted!

Labels: security, Windows