Default MAC address causes modem to lose connection

[peacetilence]

Here's a strange one. About 2 months back I'd gotten into an argument and subsequently banned a member from a forum I'd administered. Around the same time I started to experience strange instability problems with my net connection dropping and my modem switching itself off. I'd used ZoneAlarm to see that I was getting port floods from some place in either Australia or China. Thinking I might have been hacked, I changed my mac address on my modem which in turn changed my IP address, and my connection problems suddenly stopped.


Flash forward 2 months. I did a reformat of WinXP, which defaulted my mac address/ip address, and my connection is still dropping after this time had passed. I quickly changed my mac address to something random and my connection is rock solid again. If I switch it back to it's default Mac address then my connection will stop responding any my modem will cycle itself off and on. Anyone know what could be causing it to do this?

I'm not using any routers at the moment and just use the default XP firewall.

Edit: Oh yeah. I should say that I power off the modem when I change the mac address so I'm not doing something stupid like changing it and expecting it to work without allowing the modem to reset.

 

[JayAre]

I think you're paying the "you touched it last, you broke it card".

It's probably one of those unrelated coincidences.