Zone Alarm?

[Gewehr98]

Turned off or physically unplugged from the power?

Most PCs these days keep their ethernet connections alive through a standby feed from the power supply, even when the machines are "turned off".  (They're not really turned off, but drawing even less than Standby Mode) 

It keeps their IP addresses assigned for DHCP, enables Wake-On-Lan, etc.

[Balog]

Turned off or physically unplugged from the power?

Most PCs these days keep their ethernet connections alive through a standby feed from the power supply, even when the machines are "turned off".  (They're not really turned off, but drawing even less than Standby Mode) 

It keeps their IP addresses assigned for DHCP, enables Wake-On-Lan, etc.

Powered off but plugged in. It's a laptop if that makes a difference.

[CNYCacher]

Check the ip addresses on both computers, if it doesn't match, you have someone on your wifi.

You said you changed the password, but is that the admin password or the "just get connected" password?

[RocketMan]

Are you using any type of security other than just changing the SSID or disabling SSID broadcast?  How about a MAC ID filter?  Did you enable WPA or WPA2 security?

Is your head spinning yet?   

[Gewehr98]

Methinks he may have a camper sitting on his WiFi, too.

[mtnbkr]

Unless said camper is trying to access his computer, ZA wouldn't care.  That's why it would be helpful to know what sort of access ZA is blocking.

Chris

[CNYCacher]

That depends on what ZA deems to be "access", which depends on how helpful ZA want to appear to be.

Does ZA alert on all the odd networky things that windows does, like announce file shares or poll on who has file shares setup?

[mtnbkr]

Back when I was using ZA, which was a few years ago, it would alert on everything Windows did until you hit "accept" on each thing.  It was pretty dumb and you basically had to train it.  I don't know if it's any better about that.

FWIW, ZA on my corporate laptop whined a few times because other Windows systems on the same subnet were polling for a domain master browser once. 

Chris

[Balog]

That depends on what ZA deems to be "access", which depends on how helpful ZA want to appear to be.

Does ZA alert on all the odd networky things that windows does, like announce file shares or poll on who has file shares setup?

Nope, and it's just recently started this. I'll screenshot it when I get home.

[Nick1911]

This doesn't sound good.

Time to start probing that machine for open shares/ports/services!   

(Yes, I have done that, and yes - I have found someone's completed tax return PDF on a publicly accessible share this way...  )

[Thor]

It appears that Zone Alarm has some serious issues with Windows Vista. I wonder how it will work and play with Windows 7 ??

[KPT]

The "little cable thingy" on top of the TV is what I'm referring to as a "set top box".  Dunno about Comcast, but in FIOS, that little box gets its on IP address and likes to talk to the network.  It might be that box and that chatter that is so worrying to ZoneAlarm.  Or, it might be something else.  Who knows.  What does ZA say about the traffic?  What protocol, etc?

The cable box and cable modem are completely separate entities. They can't communicate with each other.

I'm not familiar with FIOS. Do the set top boxes plug into your router/switch/whatever?

[CNYCacher]

The cable box and cable modem are completely separate entities. They can't communicate with each other.

I'm not familiar with FIOS. Do the set top boxes plug into your router/switch/whatever?

The fiber comes into a box in your house.  From there it gets converted to coax cable and goes to what resembles a cable modem/wifi/router combo.  I don't know how the TV hooks up, I assume the COAX splits off to the TV but I could be wrong.