The Importance of Backing-Up - A Public Service Announcement.

About four hours ago my firewall updated itself.
All was lovely.
Later on I downloaded a packet analysis tool and installed it.
After rebooting I found I had a problem. A network driver failed to load and this prevented several services from starting and caused a several minute delay before my firewall came online and my virus scanner failed to load completely.
I uninstalled the packet analysis tool and rebooted.
No difference.
Shit.
And Double shit.
I loaded up System Restore and found a restore point that had been created earlier in the day and so I quickly restored my system to that point.
After the reboot my virus scanner came on as normal and a trip to the Event Log told me that the original problem with the driver was gone and all was hunky dory.
Nearly.
The firewall would not now load because it's files were of the new version, but windows had now been restored to a point before the update and was set-up for the previous version.
Which was no good at all.
So I uninstalled the firewall and reinstalled it went online to fetch the update. Which it didn't because it seemed to think this had already been done. Which it had.
So I've had to download the entire new version, uninstall the old one and install the new one and begin the lengthy task of reconfiguring it for my set-up.

Things could have been worse if it hadn't been for the System Restore facility of winXP. I may have had to completely restore my hard drive from a nightly hard drive backup.
Things could have been better though had I followed what I shall forever remember as the GOLDEN RULE OF SOFTWARE INSTALLATION.

Which would be:

If you have System Restore, create a restore point BEFORE installing anything on your system.

It's simple to do and saves much heartache.

fin, ende, the end.

Were you downloading firewall via AOL, 'cos the exact same thing happened to me, fortunately I to am on XP.

win xp is very nice when its needed.

i reckon the update .dat files were still residing on your machine though so you probably just needed to delete them.

what does not make sense is that the website is holding on to when you updated last. i would believe that it is in fact you comp that holds this info and was not deleted by the restore. restore i think works only on certain levels. registry, settings etc