Lack of wireless security + problems with Visual Studio and Zone Alarm
The weather is improving so I decided to sit on the balcony and use my laptop. I have a wireless connection at home so I thought no problem I will just connect to my network. It would not stop a determined hacker but I am using 128bit WEP and limiting connections to a defined set of MAC addresses. I also run a personal firewall on the laptop. Anyway the one network I could not see was my own but I could see quite a few others. So my wireless card found a network was allocated an IP address and now I was using someone else's bandwidth. They had no security configured at all !!!
I also decided that I would install Zone Alarm, which can lead to some problems debugging with Visual Studio if you are not careful. The problem is that if IIS is running when you install Zonealarm you will find that after restarting the computer that you cannot debug an application running in Visual Studio, the IDE will simply freeze. Also you will not be able to use the MMC to manage IIS.
What you have to do is configure the IIS Admin Service so that it you can start it manually and then when you restart the computer Zone Alarm will start first. Once Zone Alarm has started you can start IIS. This way Zone Alarm will display a message box asking you if you will allow internet access for IIS.