Not Sure Why It Picked Today....

....but i lost connectivity with Thunderbird. at first i thought it was my ISP, but i had internet, and i went onto the web mail version and logged-in to see if maybe the mail servers were down. they were not.

i next suspected a change i made to services. seaport.exe i disabled and shut-off last night. it looks for updates for BIngBar which i do not use, even when browsing with IE9. and seaport.exe also acts as a server for product improvement uploads, i don't want that. after re-enabling still Thunderbird cannot connect out.

i next suspected Windows 7 firewall and Windows Firewall notifier which i recently installed after favorable reviews/comments i read here. i uninstalled WFN and shutdown Wn7 firewall. Thunderbird still could not connect out.

next was Defensewall. first shutdown outbound protection...no connectivity with Thunderbird. shutdown inbound protection, same result. Thunderbird could not talk to it's mail servers. finally i disabled all DW protection which changed nothing, no email client connection.

i was puzzled before, now i am entirely baffled. so with nothing else i can think of to check, i disable WSA firewall, and now i can acquire my email through the Thunderbird client. Why today? i have had the firewall on in WSA for weeks now and had no issues with Thunderbird connectivity at all. not even a hint of a problem.
WSA firewall is still shut down and i guess i could leave it off as DW has a firewall, i have a router with a stateful firewall, and i have re-enabled Win7 firewall. but i sure would like to know how and why WSA glitched.

Joe, any ideas?


Mike