I am extremely wary of pre-release software, but since people said that Windows 7 RC is as good as Release, I went ahead and installed it. Especially because my Thinkpad T60 was rather slow with WinXP, and I did not want to even think of installing Vista on that machine. It turned out that Windows 7 ran pretty fine, most of Thinkpad stuff I reinstalled worked flawlessly, and I was rather impressed.
So I decided to install Win7 on home PC too. This is where problems started.
Everything was smooth, I went ahead and installed basic stuff, replaced Notepad with Notepad2 fired up Firefox Downloader and installed Firefox, Office, Updated drivers when necessary, rebooted a few times, installed Adobe CS3, installed few other stuff --such as Canon software for my camera-- that needs rebooting, and rebooted.
Suddenly, the network has stopped working. The network icon gives a tiny exclamation sign, browser keeps loading pages forever with no error messege. Troubleshoot wizard says it couldn't find anyproblems.
Now I don't remember how, but after pullling a lot of hair and going on tantrums, it was somehow seen that the culprit was Adobe CS3. I didn't even install all of it, mark you. Just Photoshop and Deramweaver and Acrobat. None of them should mess up the network. Uninstall Adobe, and everything works fine.
It took me longer still to find out that the problem is due to a strange service with the strange name "##Id_String2.6844F930_1628_4223_B5CC_5BB94B879762##".
Strange service ....
And this service turns out to be the "Bonjour Service".
Turns out to be Bonjour.
I didn't know what the heck this is. A Google search, and this is what Adobe has to say:
Bonjour is an open source implementation of zero-configuration networking software. It is used to dynamically discover Version Cue servers on the local network so you do not need to connect to them manually by name or IP address.
BUT I DID NOT install Version Cue. I never wanted to, and I explicitly unchecked that option when installing. Anyway, there you are. I stopped the service, set the startup to 'Disabled", the network icon got rid of the exclamation. Still, a reboot was necessary to get the network up. Repair didn't work.
Somehow, the service seems to mess up with DNS.
It seems that the name of the service is supposed to eb shown as "Bonjour Service" in the services control panel. And Adobe provides a way in the same page to fix this, which luckily includes how to remove the service.
1. "C:\Program Files\Bonjour\mDNSResponder.exe" -remove 2. "C:\Program Files\Bonjour\mDNSResponder.exe" -install
Line 1. Seems to uninstall the service. Unfortunately the command didn't work for me. Possibly it needs the service to be running. I'll check when I have some free time.