On Wed, 21 Sep 2005 12:34:42 GMT, "Jim" <jparker@new.rr.com>
wrote:
>Re each question:
>1. Have basic ZoneAlarm firewall
Doesn't matter- if it worked before any certain time of
night and you didn't reconfigure it, it won't then suddenly
stop working till the next day. However, if you hadn't
rebooted and rechecked the connection when it wasn't
working, do that.
>2. Have Spybot S&A and have run it recently. Cleaned one inocuous looking
>file. No affect on problem.
This too, is not likely to allow connections in the day but
not at night. Odds are very high it's either a
power-management, drivers that can't "wake up" properly
issue, or something out of your control, your ISP's
equipment.
Another possibility is ambient temp. Suppose you have
telephone lines or cable outside - that makes an
intermittent connection. When the air or ground outside
cools at night, that can (and does in certain situations)
regularly cause connection loss. However, previously you
reported that you can PING IP numbers but not domain names.
That alone is strong evidence that either your ISPs domain
name servers are unreachable (for whatever reason), or you
have some other windows problem (unlikely).
>3. Have McAfee anti-virus with regular auto-updates.
>4. No register check.
This would simply be a HijackThis list of things loading
when the system boots. If nothing suspicious is loading, it
can be discarded.
>5. Have no idea if porno images are passing through my computer. How do I
>determine that, and how would this cause my problem? I'd think that would
>keep my pc running, not shut it off.
There is no sense in that suggestion, you do not need to
look for porn on your system to combat this problem.
>
>I did try system restore back two months (with no effect) and then restored
>back to starting point .
>
>Based on all this, what do you recommend?
Make a log of when the connections don't work, and when they
don't, do the ping test- ping a known working IP number on
the internet, and a domain name. Log this info and contact
your ISP's tech support, letting them know about this
information else they'll probably just have you do common
things like power cycle your modem or router (but those are
also things you should try).
if your router generates a log, you might also check it to
see if anything unusual shows up.
If this is only a Domain-name resolution (to IP #) problem,
a temporary workaround might be running something like
"Treewalk" (
http://ntcanuck.com/ ) on a system always
connected on your LAN or same system, but you still would
need to contact your ISP and have them fix the problem.
Until the ISP can track down these kinds of problems, nobody
will know. You'd be surprised how long it can take an ISP
to track down a problem due to techs merely recanting the
common "it must be a problem on your end" mantra. Indeed,
it IS often a problem on the end-user's system, but not
always.
The evidence you need is whether you can ping (and tracert)
addresses on the internet when you can't access anything
with a proper domain name (like yahoo.com).
Loss of internet connection each night 
Linear Mode
