I’ve been using Jungle Disk for nearly three years now for reliable, easy, and inexpensive cloud storage. The software uses Amazon S3 storage or their own Rackspace storage. Since I currently run five machines at home and one at work the network drive that Jungle Disk mounts is great for storing large files. It can also be configured to do automatic backups. For things that change everyday, I also run Windows Live Mesh.

Recently on my new Vista machine the Jungle Disk service would just hang in the starting state. I tried reinstalling several times with the same result. I resorted to the Jungle Disk help desk.

The first response was disappointing: make Jungle Disk an exception in the firewall and make sure ports 80 and 443 are open. Since none of the other machines running McAfee had this set, I didn’t think it would help. But of course I tried it to no avail.

I specifically asked how to remove all program information before the installation. Every time I tried reinstalling the software I was never asked for my Amazon S3 information. I had assumed it was a registry entry, but in fact for Vista it is stored in an XML file in C:\ProgramData\JungleDisk. Removing the files in that location fixed the problem and I was able to re-enter the Amazon information and run the program without the service hanging.

Only four or five hours of work for what I guess was a gamma ray striking some part of my disk drive since there had been no configuration changes or installs to prompt this behavior.