Good morning. I hope all of you guys are twitching around with glee, unable the contain the warm and loving feeling of upcoming snow and the beginning of winter as you hold whatever book you are reading right now clenched tightly into your groin. (For my part, it's "Version control with Subversion", if you're interested. I know you aren't, but I decided you would be.) So, I know this has been discussed over and over on this very list, and you probably clicked this mail, all worked up about telling me to go read the articles and google around, and especially read the step-by-step, easy to understand guides posted here and here, and perhaps even go so far as to scream, among the braying and neighing of barnyard animals, to go check my ISA logs so I can find proof of my own incompetence and clumsiness and properly configuring a rule to allow it. Oh yes, I can see you, your finger throbbing with expectation over the mouse button, ready to fire up a vitriolic message. But no, no, I assure you, this seems different. It should not even concern ISA Server, but rather, just the Firewall Client. I have recently moved to a new workstation at work here, and while reinstalling my stuff, I decided to pay windowsupdate.com a visit, for it would be more efficient than just trying to bear the excruciatingly wrongly configured SUS server here, which is not exactly working. To much of my surprise, it worked fine. My workstation is currently NAT'ed through the Netscreen, so I have no need for the Firewall Client to be installed right now. Yesterday, I installed the firewall client, for support, thrills, kicks and excitement about seeing my winsock layer and TCP/IP stack brutally violated, in an unspeakable manner, and surprise surprise, Windows update no longer works. Not really surprising, I say. It has not been configured in ISA. But my problem here is this: Windows update fails with the same behaviour (error messages and such in windowsupdate.log) as noted in KB Articles and previous posting - EVEN WHEN THE ISA CLIENT IS DISABLED. So get this: Windowsupdate will fail *THE SPLIT SECOND* The Firewall Client is *installed*. It doesn't have to be actually working or do anything useful, just be *there*. And my machine is not going through secureNAT, but plain good old NAT. And it fails, just as if a firewall of some sort was blocking connections or something was wrong with BITS. Everything is up to date and patched, I followed every direction if every KB article - I remind you, it used to work. Then I installed the Firewall Client, and immediately checked. It doesn't work now. Even if the Firewall client is disabled on my desktop. Any ideas?