VPN stopped working. why?

[dsa1971]

I recently upgraded from windows xp home edition to windows xp professional. Before upgrading I had a VPN connection setup to connect to my office server. After upgrading to xp professional everything was working fine until a couple of days after the upgrade. Now the VPN connection does not work. It gives me the 'Error 800 could not connect'. I have a laptop with windows xp home edition using the same VPN and it works fine. Both computers are running on the same home network. I have a wireless router that both computers share and the only firewall is the one built into the cable modem. Any idea what I should start checking? Both VPNs are setup the same.

 

[dsa1971]

No need to answer this. I finally figured it out. I had to uninstall ZoneAlarm. Even though I was not using ZoneAlarm at this point and it was not running it obviously had something running in the background that I was not aware of that was mucking up my VPN connection. Once I uninstalled ZoneAlarm everything worked fine.

 

[2cornot2c]

Just so you are aware, the upgrade from XP Home to XP Professional is a recipe for problems. Unless you do a full install from scratch, you are in for a long ride.

I am telling you from experience, OS upgrades on top of each other never works properly. I am 110% sure that you will have many more problems to come.

Blue screen/dumping physical memory/programs not working properly/OS problems/Registry Problems/etc..

 

[dsa1971]

Why would upgrading from XP Home to XP Pro be such a problem? They are essentially the same with Pro just having additional features added on. I have heard people having major issues with upgrading to XP from 95/98 or ME but not from XP Home. So far I have not had anything other than the issue with the VPN not working. That is working fine now though.

 

[2cornot2c]

I am telling you from experience, not from what I heard from people. Several users on my domain had purchased notebooks with XP Home installed. When we migrated our servers to 2000 we had to migrate those users also to XP Pro. Not only was the warranty on the notebooks void, due to the upgrade. The vendors would not give us support on any of them and a couple of months later we started experienceing many problems.

Again, many people might tell you that they are not having problems with the upgrade, it could be that they are running minimal software packages. Or it could be that they got lucky. In any case, I am just giving you my opinion.

 

[dsa1971]

I did read on this site as well as microsoft's knowledge base that there have problems with upgrading from Windows XP Home Edition to Windows XP Professional but that it is mainly with OEM installations oof XP Home Edition on laptops. I upgrade my desktop computer. After correcting the VPN problem, my computer has been running fine. Hopefully it will continue that way.