dionysian

First - I've already sought help at SmartFTP's forums for this and the developers chose to ignore the problem their installer caused on my system. But this is a global problem in Vista now, it affects a lot more than SmartFTP, which is why I came here.

• I very actively use FTP and connect to about 20 sites over 5 or 6 hosts.
  
• Beginning immediately after installing SmartFTP 3, and now, get the ""No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it." message on any and all connect attempts.
  
• FileZilla is also giving me error messages, and the basic Windows command line FTP program is the only one that even lets me connect and log in to my sites. However, upon login, I'll try to do a simple dir command and get a timeout. What's even more strange is that if I do a basic command like a directory change, that is successful.
  
• Also, programs give me errors when they try to perform some FTP-based function, such as Ad-Aware trying to connect to the update server.

This problem began immediately after I installed the latest version of SmartFTP on my Vista machine. I noticed during the installation that it listed some other active programs as sharing files that would need to be updated in the installation. These included Thunderbird, a couple of other Internet based programs, and Windows Explorer itself. The latter I found very odd.

After all this happened, I tried uninstalling Smart FTP and was told that I would need to restart before the installation would complete (file sharing I suppose). I told it to proceed, then the uninstall seemed to disappear for a while. I finally just restarted, and SmartFTP was gone.

I then reinstalled and am still experiencing the same problems.

Other info:

I do not use any antivirus package. For firewall, I have only Windows Firewall. I disabled it and still have the problems. So I re-enabled it.

This cannot be a router or ISP issue, because two other machines here are fine with the new version, one on a wireless connection and one not.

I've also looked in the Firewall settings, there is absolutely nothing blocking port 21, SmartFTP, or the command line FTP. They're explicitly allowed.

Thanks for your help - this is really hurting my ability to manage my sites. It is probably just a setting buried somewhere in Vista that the installer screwed with (in many installations of previous versions of SmartFTP, I've never seen it need to modify files in use by explorer.exe.)