Accessing Device Manager causes Dial-Up

[Paul Komski]

Clean install of WinME on a new standalone build. Everything OK. Image file made. Installed IE6sp1 and thereafter whenever any access to Device Manger is made there is an attempt to Dial-Up. Weird!

Definitely due to IE6sp1 installation as going back to the image does away with the problem and then reinstalling IE6sp1 creates the same problem.

There has never been any internet access (awaiting modem) and IE6sp1 was installed from MS CD of MSDN Apr2003 - (the same installation was used on my main PC running WinXP without any problems).

Anyone know what is going on. HijackThis is incidentally negative for malware - but then it should be since there is very little installed apart from the OS and there has been no connection to a LAN or WAN.

??

[classicsoftware]

Uninstall the offending program and use Windows update to keep your program up to date...

[Paul Komski]

I don't need to uninstall - just went back to the pre-ie6 updated image.

I haven't been able to find anything like this searching around and it seems strange that simply going into device manager should do this. One of the problems of trying to see if this is a known issue is finding a good search string - since dial-up and device manager are linked in many ways.

In my distant memory there was a similar thing with accessing Device Manager but opening Windows Explorer on that occasion. Just hoped someone might have come across something similar.

[Paul Komski]

Hooked up a borrowed modem and downloaded IE6sp1 from Windows Update. (And yes the download can be saved to disk to install later. Maybe this is new but if you click on the Advanced Button after the Installer Setup has run you can choose to Download rather than the more normal Download-and-Install all in one. There have been a few posts about this specific thing and it has not been clear whether it was possible to download IE6sp1 - so at least that bit of good came out of this.)

After installing and rebooting - once again entering Device Manager wanted to dial-up somewhere just as before. With Kerio in place I allowed the dial-up to proceed and it was "Windows Catalog Registration" phoning home and connecting to crl.microsoft.com from C:\windows\system\sucatreg.exe

I guess if I had done this with the first IE6sp1 from the MSDN CD that the result would have been the same. Anyway this was, I think, a single check of the signature for the IE exception pack and after rebooting again - accessing Device Manager works normally.

[Paul Komski]

From:- http://www.careyholzman.com/fixes.htm
Problem: When I open msinfo32 Device Manager it tries to connect to the internet. It is sucatreg.exe (Windows catalogue registration) knocking on the door out. What is it trying to do and how do I stop it doing it?
Possible Solution: Most likely you have an "unsigned" driver that sucatreg.exe is trying to update a driver for or you may have a damaged catalog. In Control Panel, double-click Internet Options, click on the TAB labeled Advanced, scroll down the list to the heading of Security, and Uncheck the option “Check for publisher’s certificate revocation.”, Then click OK. That should fix it.


That did fix it! ;)