Waking from sleep and detected a new private network - is this a virus?

I am running vista home premium on a dell 530 and have just had to
restore factory settings due to my user account being corrupted. I have
reinstalled all my software and now have realised that it is doing what
It has done before in the five months I have had it (after restore to
factory settings) which is waking from sleep on it's own. I did find a
solution to this on a forum which is to go to device manager / network
adapter / intel.... / properties / power management / wake from LAN and
uncheck the first two settings "wake on directed packet" and "wake on
magic packet". Now as this solves the problem I am confused as to why my
"factory settings" have it checked????

Now, immediately after closing the properties window I got a dialogue
box saying that a new private network has been detected with a
highlighted option to call it local network#2... this freaked me out as
I have not connected anything to even remotely act as another network
and further more there was an ip address in the bar at the top of the
dialogue box which I noted (169.254.175.32/255.255.0.0)

I would just like to know if this is behaviour of a virus of some sort
or something normal beyond my understanding.

Can anyone help?


--
emanation

Hi emanation,

I think those behavior are of the factory default settings which will enable
you to set up a network connection without much operation needed if your
computer is connected to a modem or a router. My opinion, you may consider
to burn a recovery CD and customize the settings with it (such as
auto-awake). You may need to contact the manufacture or the manual for the
details of recovery cd or other media backups. It is always a good idea to
have some firewalls on your machine though.

"emanation" <> wrote in message
news:...
>
> I am running vista home premium on a dell 530 and have just had to
> restore factory settings due to my user account being corrupted. I have
> reinstalled all my software and now have realised that it is doing what
> It has done before in the five months I have had it (after restore to
> factory settings) which is waking from sleep on it's own. I did find a
> solution to this on a forum which is to go to device manager / network
> adapter / intel.... / properties / power management / wake from LAN and
> uncheck the first two settings "wake on directed packet" and "wake on
> magic packet". Now as this solves the problem I am confused as to why my
> "factory settings" have it checked????
>
> Now, immediately after closing the properties window I got a dialogue
> box saying that a new private network has been detected with a
> highlighted option to call it local network#2... this freaked me out as
> I have not connected anything to even remotely act as another network
> and further more there was an ip address in the bar at the top of the
> dialogue box which I noted (169.254.175.32/255.255.0.0)
>
> I would just like to know if this is behaviour of a virus of some sort
> or something normal beyond my understanding.
>
> Can anyone help?
>
>
> --
> emanation

Thanks for your reassurance, I do have Comodo internet security as
antivirus and firewall and spy ware. Do you think then that it was a
neighbours' network being detected rather than someone online trying to
hack into my computer?


--
emanation

You can check the properties of that local network connection and see which
network adapter card is used. If it is a wireless network adapter, then it
is likely that your wireless card detected something. If it is a LAN card,
then it could be there is a Local Connection established in the recovery
image and it is trying to connect your computer to the Internet but did not
find a DHCP server.

"emanation" <> wrote in message
news:...
>
> Thanks for your reassurance, I do have Comodo internet security as
> antivirus and firewall and spy ware. Do you think then that it was a
> neighbours' network being detected rather than someone online trying to
> hack into my computer?
>
>
> --
> emanation

"emanation" <> wrote in message
news:...
>
> Thanks for your reassurance, I do have Comodo internet security as
> antivirus and firewall and spy ware. Do you think then that it was a
> neighbours' network being detected rather than someone online trying to
> hack into my computer?
>
>
> --
> emanation

A 169.x.x.x network address is in a private address range that is used by
Windows to assign random private addresses to network adapters manually when
the external DHCP source fails to allocate one (or if no DHCP server
exists). These addresses do not communicate directly with the internet
(similarly 192.x.x.x, 10.x.x.x, some others).

Apparently when coming out of sleep mode your network adapter is not able to
reconnect to its usual DHCP source, be it a modem or router or your ISP.
Vista detects the the new private address as a new network connection.
Inconvenient but not sinister. If your computer normally gets an internet
IP from your ISP you may need to have the DHCP lease time or the connection
time-out period shortened so that the previously assigned IP for your
computer is released when your computer goes into sleep mode. Just thinking
that if the ISP has your computer listed as already connected when your
computer comes out of sleep it likely won't issue a second IP to the same
computer, so the adapter doesn't get an address from DHCP and Windows
automatic addressing takes over.