AT&T “Ghost” Connection

THE SCENARIO
Some of you have heard my various gripes about my home connection over the past year (while the rest of you had the good sense not to read when I start bitching about it). When I work from the house I’m stuck with AT&T Wireless GSM service, which despite the nifty commercials (I’m in Bumfuck Egypt… and I just found the internet) is somewhere between dialup and communicating with two soup cans attached by kite string.

This is of course only true when used in a poor line of site location (aka – “my house”). Everywhere else it is just as good as being plugged into a t-3 line, but I live in one of the few spots in the Dallas / Ft Worth metro that it sucks to use it. It’s been such a pain to work from home that there are people at Starbucks that probably think I’m an employee there.

CONFLEECTS? We don’t have no steenkin’ confleects!
I’ve long suspected there was an internal conflict between Vista’s network software and the AT&T Communication software required to run the nifty little plug-in wireless modems. I’ve purchased 6 wireless cards in less than 1 year, trying to find a combination that worked well, and spent hours on the line with AT&T support when the freezups and conflicts occurred, always with them assuring me I couldnt connect without their fine AT&T Communication Manager software running the thing. Various reps there have blamed the issues on everything but global warming, but never their product.

ACCIDENTAL “GHOST” CONNECTION :-)
A few minutes ago I shut off the AT&T Communication Manager from the “Processes” tab of Windows Task Manager because both Firefox and Vista were in “Not Responding” mode. Had to shut them both off that way… if I try shutting down AT&T CM off via the “Applications” tab it locks up my entire computer and forces me to do a hard shutdown.

I accidentally restarted Firefox before re-starting AT&T Communication Manager. Shoulda given me a failed connection when my homepage opened up. No such thing. Right now I’m online… and have the best connection here to date. The only thing visibly running in my apps tab is Firefox… no AT&T software.

I gotta write all this down so I can try to recreate this connection. Got here accidentally, but if I can run this without their POS software I gotta feeling life in the kingdom just took a huge step toward “less frustrating”.