Before a firewall kicks in...

Hi André,

Can you tell us what version of Windows you are running? Also, please tell us a little more about the circumstances regarding what you are seeing...

Activity lights flashing on a cable modem does not necessarily mean that your OS is actually responding to anything in any meaningful way. It may just be that you are seeing normal network activity (probes from the Internet and even background noise).

I asked about your version of Windows because ZA works a little differently depending upon version. If you are on NT, 2K or XP, the firewall component in ZA actually starts as a service very early in the PC startup sequence. (It runs under the program name vsmon.exe which is referred to as the True Vector Service.) The user interface starts later and is visible as the ZA icon in the systray. That icon not being there does not mean the firewall is not active. It is active through the vsmon program.

Edit: The two components still start separately in Windows ME/9x, as well, with vsmon starting as early as possible, however, it starts earlier on NT based OS systems.

 

Well, remember one thing... Your computer can only communicate with other systems in a meaningful way if there is a specific application running connected to/on some port. If no application is connected to a port, then no matter how much activity comes in via the Internet on that port, all the OS will do is respond that the port is closed.

Since this is all happening very early in the system bootup sequence, there really isn't too much likelihood that much else is going on. Given that the OS is still booting, there isn't too much you can do to monitor this. Even installing some other software package to monitor activity won't help because it won't have started that early in the boot process either.

If you have a second machine and can plug it into the network as well, you could run sniffer software to watch everything that happens on the wire while that system boots.

If you want to stop any chance of such activity, then a separate firewall or even just a basic NAT router would protect your system while it boots.

 

Well that could simply be your system trying to get it's assigned IP address via DHCP.

Personally, I don't let network services come up on their own during the boot process just to avoid all the different things you've described. I start the network connection manually when the system is up and I'm ready to use it. That's another option in addition to the things mentioned above.