My internet got screwed this morning after a windows update too. I had to turn off zone alarm to fix it. I was double pissed off because my ability to play a cd or dvd in the machine has been crippled by something else I installed or updated in the last week or two, and I was only doing the windows update to see if that would fix it (it didn't).

I'm leaning more and more towards the view that the primary bottleneck in the Internet and in personal computing devices moving towards the future is Windows. It seems to me that every time the latest update installs, my PC at home performs worse. Now I'm worried that I have befallen the same fate, because it auto-installed the latest update last night and, when I woke up this morning, it was frozen on the "shutting down" screen. I though to myself "self, that can't be a good sign". Now I guess I know what to expect when I get home tonight.

On a brighter note, my iPhone will arrive in two weeks!

Oh, you Windows people.

I saw this on news.com... seems Windows Update+ZoneAlarm=no interwebs.

Everyone together now: FUCK WINDOWS! WHY DON'T U WORK!?

Workaround

Yeah, I had the same thing happen last night. The tubes work, the update loads, the tubes no work anymore. Yes, I have Zone Alarm. I did my system restore, and was back to the tubes again. Wasn't really hard to figure out, but it was the first time I've had to use system restore. Windows doesn't make that easy to find either if you don't use it.

Fuck windows. !hen I get a new computer it's not going to be windows, that's for sure.

Much as everyone likes to slam Windows, I'm of the opinion that modern Microsoft-published code is some of the best tested, most thoroughly debugged code available. The problem lies in third-party products, like firewalls, video drivers, and what-not, which may or may not adhere to the published APIs. The difficulty for the average consumer is that the line between MS software and 3rd party-provided code is not always easy to distinguish.

The issues that folks have mentioned here are not Windows; each case ia a problem with software written by other companies and running under Windows.

Remember: One in a billion is next Tuesday, for Microsoft. Any bad outcome will, statistically speaking, become evident almost immediately once the entire planet starts running the software. Moreover, the possible permutations of hardware and software are too infinite to QA, and if some vendor's software breaks things because it doesn't adhere to the published guidelines, there's not much to be done about it in practical terms.

Much as everyone likes to slam Windows, I'm of the opinion that modern Microsoft-published code is some of the best tested, most thoroughly debugged code available.

I couldn't disagree more. I've written code against the win32 API. It is badly documented (despite the massiveness of the MSDN documentation - a large API is not necessarily a better API, orthogonality is a good thing) and idiosyncratic. There are problems you must work around. It's easy to say that it's always the 3rd party's fault, but an OS is made to have applications written for it. If you run nothing but a pristine windows installation, of course it will be fine. When MS subtly changes the longstanding behavior of an API call or series of API calls through an update, as they've apparently done here, you really can't just go off and say it's the 3rd party's fault. The API and documentation are simply not that good.