Things I learned this week (sorry, Carl!):

• The Cisco VPN Client software is very fickle. In order to upgrade from 4.8 to 5.0, you need to uninstall and install, with reboots to be found everywhere.
• Installing an entire slew of MS updates is usually a good idea to keep your system up to date.
• Even though your computer works fine at home, you can't rely on it working the same way when you get to work. For example, you might have internet access at home with no problems, but when you get to work, traffic over port 80 will suddenly stop about 5 minutes from the time you power up. https, ftp, email, IM, and everything else will continue to work just fine. Just no http traffic over port 80.
• 5 minutes is not a lot of time to conduct google searches to find out what's wrong.
• MS System Restore is implemented about as horribly as anything I've ever seen.
• After running System Restore, the problem does not go away.
• To make matters worse, System Restore totally hosed my Office install where it deleted a bunch of files from MSOCache, thereby causing my Office products to not be able to launch properly, or even uninstall.
• After copying missing files back to MSOCache, all of the Office applications claimed they needed to repair installs upon launch. Every time.
• MS has really good directions for how to manually uninstall Office 2007.
• Seconds before doing a complete wipe of your system, it's a good thing to double check with friends who have Google-Fu.
• It turns out that c:\windows\system32 has 2 files: vsdatant.dll and vsdatant.sys. These files get linked with ZoneAlarm a lot in google searches, but they are also used by the Cisco VPN Client. Something in the Cisco (un)installer caused rogue versions of these files to be left in my system. Rebooting to Safe Mode to clean these files up (along with the registry entries) finally got things back to normal.

And that, my friends, is what I learned this week. Now where's that next Monday's episode?!?