As posted previously, I have installed the new OneCare beta on my Vista RC1 machine. Now I found that everything’s not perfect with it: it kills connectivity with my Windows Mobile device, which had previously been working nicely. I’ve spent a moment looking around for relevant configuration opportunities and found none. I also looked for log files that might give more insight into the problem, but found none of those either. It’s possible to get a log file out of OneCare, but that doesn’t contain anything similar to a “normal” firewall logfile entry. Basically it seems like OneCare protects the virtual network adapter for the Windows Mobile device by letting nothing through, but at the same time it never mentions the fact to the user, nor does it let the user do anything about it. I hope that’s not the whole story, but I can’t spend much more time right now looking into it.

Update: word has reached me out of Microsoft that this is a bug related to the combination of various beta versions on my system. It’s being “looked into” – I’m looking forward to the result.

My virus scanner of choice had been NOD32 for a pretty long while now, but they don’t seem to be very supportive so far of Vista users. Same goes for ZoneAlarm Pro, which I had been using as a personal firewall solution, mainly for those situations where my laptop runs outside my own network. While the ESET guys (makers of NOD32), or at least their british support franchise, had the courtesy of replying to my mails, ZoneLabs did not, to this date, answer any of my questions about their state of Vista support.

Due to these problems, I had been using the special Vista version of Trend Micro’s PC-cillin that Microsoft list on their pages and I hadn’t seen any problems. But today the Windows Live OneCare Beta of version 1.5 started, and it’s Vista compatible. So I decided to try it out.

After downloading a huge amount of stuff, the installer informed me that my existing PC-cillin installation would be in the way of OneCare and it had to be removed. I okay’d that, but the uninstallation failed for no particular reason, so I cancelled the OneCare installation and uninstalled PC-cillin manually. When I restarted OneCare installation afterwards, the installation failed with the error code 0019-80070643 and the offer of further support on the web – but the support pages that I was sent to want to query a “product id” from me, which I don’t have for the OneCare product.

When I got back from the odyseey through the support web pages, I hit the “Close” (or something) button in the OneCare installation window and suddenly it started “cleaning up my system”. Well, nice – why hadn’t that happened before? No idea, but after the process finished (and I had rebooted yet another time) I was able to install OneCare just fine (hey, and rebooted again, of course).

OneCare is typically Microsoft: the product seems to do its job in the background now, but it’s not the same experience of enormous flexibility that’s common in major 3rd party anti-virus and personal firewall products. One option dialog with five pages (“Tune-up”, “backup”, “viruses and spyware”, “firewall” and “logging&rdquo and that’s it. Time will tell me if that’s a good thing or not.

A technical difference I’ve noticed in comparison with ZoneAlarm is that when an application is caught communicating with the network for the first time, OneCare makes that first attempt fail for the application while showing its “allow or not” dialog, often bringing up error messages within the application itself. ZoneAlarm somehow managed to make the application wait while the user was being consulted, which seemed a better idea to me. I can imagine there are pros and cons to both approaches, but the OneCare way of doing things has the drawback that I often need to start the process once again after confirming things for OneCare – and in some cases (like XanaNews) I even have to restart the application. Of course this should happen only once… well.