I bought a HP MediaSmart machine running Windows Home Server the other week and had my first problem with it tonight. For some reason, the client connector software wasn't working right on my Windows 7 laptop. After uninstalling the "Windows Home Server Connector" client software and reinstalling (I tried reinstalling from the CD and from the //SERVER/Software/ folder) it always failed on the bit that said "Configuring computer backup".

Hmm... that's strange. It's a brand new server, running the brand new Windows 7, I'm installing what must be the latest version of the client software from the server share... but it's failing.

A colleague had problems with the same thing and suggested installing Power Pack 3 on the Home Server to ensure I have Windows 7 support. I checked, and sure enough it was already installed. My server and laptop were all up to date.

After digging around for a while I saw that in the Event Viewer on my Windows 7 laptop it was logging an error each time the connector software failed:

"Windows Home Server protocol mismatch. This computer uses protocol version 6.0.2030.2, but partner computer SERVER uses protocol version 6.0.2423.0. A connection cannot be established."

There was another similar one in there too:

"Windows Home Server protocol mismatch. This computer uses protocol version 133038082, but partner computer bb328f67-0000-0000-0000-cd7e35e1d99f uses protocol version 158793728. A connection cannot be established."

Hmm, strange: it seems like the connector client software I'm trying to install isn't the latest version! After more digging around, I found a WeGotServed thread on a similar problem and one commenter mentioned finding a folder on the server (C:\WHS) with some connector software in it, which fixed it for him. But wait, that's strange. The latest connector software should always be in //SERVER/Software/ right? So I used Remote Desktop onto my Home Server and found the two folders and compared the installer files. The //SERVER/Software/ connector software was about 5 months older than the software in the hidden-away C:\WHS folder!

I installed the newest connector on my client machine and that solved my problem :-)

Since my last post about the ASP.NET development server mysteriously not working it seems that Microsoft and several security firms have confirmed that the issue was definitely caused by Windows Defender and due to one of its definition updates that went out on Monday evening (9th March).

Read about it on CNET.

Windows Defender mistakenly raised the Win32/PossibleHostsFileHijack alarm deleting the crucial mapping between localhost and 127.0.0.1.  DOH!

I got to work today and was unable to connect to any web sites using the built in ASP.NET Development Server.  In Internet Explorer I got the following message: "Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage" and in Firefox the message was "Failed to Connect" and "The connection was refused when attempting to contact localhost:3503".

This was strange, I had no problems yesterday, and no updates to .NET or Visual Studio had been installed on my machine overnight. Looking at windows update history, the only thing that had changed was an update to the Windows Defender definition file. Surely that can't be the problem, I thought. After a long time scratching my head, it appears that the problem was indeed Windows Defender and on further investigation I found this in my Windows Defender history:

So it appears that last night, Windows Defender removed this line from my hosts file (C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc):

127.0.0.1    localhost

and either added or left behind the following line:

::1    localhost

Windows Defender has "defended" me from developing on my local machine, because localhost isnæt mapped correctly. To fix this problem, adding the first example (above) back into my hosts file and removing the second example fixed the problem.

I wonder how many other developers this affected?