Re: Is ntl disabling routers?
 

It may not be a case of someone latching on to your computer as such as installing loads of dodgy spyware on it (although people do this). It may simply be a case of someone using your PC, going to an infected site (by accident) and acidentally infecting your PC that way. Viruses and Trojans can also be delivered via email, usually as attachments, but there are ways to use an HTML email to infect certain machines.

I would recommend installing and running the following (all free):

Lavasoft's Adaware (http://www.lavasoft.com). This is a good spyware scanner. If it finds any evidence of spyware, it allows you to delete it.

Spybot (http://www.safer-networking.org/). This is partly a spyware scanner and remover (like Adaware), but also prevents known spyware installing itself (essentially, it tricks Internet Explorer into thinking the spyware is already installed, thus preventing IE downloading it again).

Javacool's Spyware Guard: (http://www.javacoolsoftware.com/). Similar to Spybot in that it prevents Spyware being installed, but it does this by monitoring the system for changes that Spyware is likely to make.

Microsoft's Windows Defender: (http://www.microsoft.com/athome/secu...e/default.mspx )

This is descended from Microsoft's AntiSpyware (which saved my PC on a few occassions), and works (again) by checking for actions likely to be performed by Spyware. The difference is that it checks for more actions that Spywareguard, and gives you the option to allow or disallow the action. It can optionally give a recommendation based on what other users of Windows Defender have done (so, for instance, if a well-known program needs to make changes to the registry, Windows Defender will look on it's network, find out that other users have allowed this change and recommend you allow it).

Re: Is ntl disabling routers?
 

Many thanks for your constructive help. I'm a bit embarrassed about the title of this thread now! I think I will ditch Zone Alarm for the time being and see how I get on with Adaware. How much does it degrade performance? Well I suppose I should suck it and see.

---------- Post added at 15:39 ---------- Previous post was at 15:35 ----------

Amazing! After crawling all day so far, it has just leapt back up to 1.9 Mb/sec! What does this mean? Watch this space :)

So all I have left to fix is Firefox which ZA has disabled.

Re: Is ntl disabling routers?
 

Bear in mind that Adaware is not a firewall. You should use it in conjunction with a firewall.

Re: Is ntl disabling routers?
 

Yes I realise that. I have turned on the Windows firewall for the time being, although I know it's not up to much. Speed is terrible again today. Are you saying that a spyware infection on the PC itself can slow the connection? In which case why is speed OK without the router? I am finding all this very hard to grasp!

Re: Is ntl disabling routers?
 

Sorry, didn't mean to be patronising. If you have installed all the software I have mentioned above, and made sure it updated itself, and run scans, the chances are you don't have any spyware.

How do the individual programs affect performance?

Adaware doesn't (unless you activate the "Tea Timer" System Settings protection setting), it requires that you scan the system from time to time.

Spybot, again, doesn't use any resources (it actually adjusts settings within the browsers to stop them installing spyware rather than preventing the installation itself. As with Adaware though, I would advise you scan your system regularly though.

Spywareguard and Windows Defender both do use some resources, but TBH, they will not impact your connection, and don't seem to use many resources (put it this way, I have them all installed on the Laptop I am currently using. The connection I have at work is far faster than 10 Meg, and network speeds aren't affected).

---------- Post added at 19:15 ---------- Previous post was at 19:05 ----------

I am not saying it is definately spyware, but this is one possibility.

The way that spyware slows down your connection is by literally flooding it with connection attempts. It's possible that this is causing the CPU in your router to overload, and effectively hang.

It can also be an incompatibility with the router. I know that networking hardware follows standard protocols (so you can mix and match hardware from different companies), but we have found at work that our machines with onboard intel NICS occassionally cause our 3com switches to do exactly what you have just described (slow down the connection). We ended up replacing the Intel onboard NICS with 3Com cards and all is well.

Re: Is ntl disabling routers?
 

Many thanks again for your advice. I really didn't think you were being patronising at all :)

I have temporarily given up and have ditched the router. Now sharing the internet connection between 2 PCs, with no probs except that I can't get MSN Messenger on the client to connect through the firewall on the gateway PC. But what I don't understand is that this router set-up has worked fine for 2-3 years, and suddenly went mad about 3 weeks ago. Something happened then, and we didn't change anything at our end. And 2 new routers behave exactly the same. It's a mystery which I must solve!

Re: Is ntl disabling routers?
 

Final (I hope) update. ICS was a total nightmare, so I have installed a SafeCom router and ditched ZA. No problems at all now after 3 days. Something very odd about Belkin routers. Just one of those unsolved mysteries.