Great show! Now, back to the 'Computer Jungle'
Thanks Tarq, again, some good stuff there.
What happened was:
ZA Free: installed Avast and in the process it warned me they were 'working on compatability issues' with ZA. I believe I selected something called a 'transparent mode' for ZA to permit progress.
Installation complete and I noticed the ZA tray icon was missing - 'transparent' thought I. After 2 mins browsing or so, my browser connection (both IE and FF) to the router stopped. Email and Ping access stayed. My laptop was 'broken out' of the cupboard and had no problems (still running an 'unaffected' AVG8). Only repeated reboots of the desktop restored the router connection.
I looked into the router log and it showed TCP FIN SCAN from an IP which resolved to 'Akamai' (
About Akamai), a US company involved in internet business, the 'scan' log entry being coincident with router drop. I realised ZA was in fact not there at all, and reinstalled it, which required shutting down avast to close the true vector modules. With ZA reinstalled I have not had another router drop.
Some questions for the experts from someone well out of their depth:-
1) Why would the router drop the connection and what does the return of ZA the fold mean?
2) My router firewall is/was at 'high' - would this have protected me during the 'outage'?
3) I have seen (this AM) a couple of 'UDP flood' log entries (please bear in mind that I have not been a frequent reader of router logs in the past
) - should I panic?
4) I have now checked my desktop via Shieldsup and it shows 100% stealth - can I relax?