Mystery

I installed Windows in my laptop yesterday using VMWare. I installed the driver for my ADSL modem, and proceeded to download and install the things you cannot run Windows without: Firefox, ZoneAlarm, AntiVir, etc. Only problem was, before connecting to the Internet, I had to physically pull out the modem cable from the USB port and plug it back in, in order to force the (Linux) cxacru driver to relinquish control over the modem. Not willing to settle for such a hack every time I booted Windows -- rare though such occurrences may be -- I decided to try to make Windows use my already running instance of Privoxy as a proxy server. Bzzt. Found that Privoxy was listening on 127.0.0.1, which cannot be accessed by the virtual network interface helpfully set up by VMWare for the Windows virtual machine. I could, of course, change the Privoxy listen-address to that at the Linux end of the virtual interface, but somehow this didn't feel right.

Here's where the mystery comes in: just for the heck of it, I booted Windows and started Firefox without pointing it to any proxies, and I was able to connect to the Internet. What gives? Not that I'm complaining.