Curious XP networking problem

[andyf]

Right i'll explain this as best I can ..

Windows XP system running on my shuttle. Been fine at home on Nildram broadband, i-series etc etc. no problems.

Brought PC over to isle of man to use and initially connected up to the apartments broadband by wireless to the router, using shuttle's own 802.11b wireless thing the machine came with.

Seemed fine but ran into a problem whereby visiting websites falls on its arse.

I get the front page load ok, so it seems like I get the index.html / .asp or whatever, but then anything connected to the front page, referenced in the index file, like images, flash etc just fail to load. They timeout.

If I try to refresh / reload the page it will do NOTHING and give a connection to xyz.com timed out style error.

This affects both Internet Explorer and Firefox. I'm running SP2, have been for a while.

Tried the 'netsh int ip reset' command but other than showing a couple of 'bad' keys that got reset and rebooting, it hasn't fixed the problem.


For example I load forums.multiplay.co.uk

I get the front page with all the forums, but none of the images load at all. if I try clicking on a link, or refreshing, I'll eventually just get a 'timed out' error.

I have to wait about 10~ minutes before it works again, at which point it works fine for an undetermined amount of time. usually the next time I come back to the PC and try going to the site, it goes through this whole bull**** routine again.

Any suggestions / insights into this? I'm reluctant to just stuff XP back on the machine, as I'd like a proper fix for it, but I don't even have a clue how to go about describing the problem into something like google for results. Nothing so far on MS's site about tcp/ip troubleshooting seems to apply. It seems very much to affect HTTP only. I'm not using a proxy server. The network setup is the same for my laptop and my flatmate's pc's and they don't have aproblem at all. Just my desktop :(

edit: i got a wired connection to the network and it still occurs, so it wasn't the wireless (which i was initially blaming).

[KingDaveRa]

Do you have a cache set in your browser? Different ISP's cache might be arsing about.

[andyf]

nope, IE and firefox are clean of proxy / cache / cookie settings and still doing it.

Firefox is being slightly different: it tends to load more of a page before the 'cut-off' hits, as if it's able to just eek out a bit more data. It's as if the provider, manx telecom, suddenly block my access to **** for a few minutes.

I fired up slashdot as this is currently being affected, and took one of their image urls. I stuck it in a downloader tool, net transport, and watched.

2004-10-24 02:44:53.328 Connecting to images.slashdot.org:80
2004-10-24 02:44:53.328 Connecting to 66.35.250.55:80


and then timeout

this happened for 2-3 minutes. on the next retry, it went through flawlessly and downloaded. I fired up IE again and went to slashdot, and lo and behold the whole site now works.

I've just gone back to slashdot right now, and it's broken again. I have all the stuff from the front page, and no images are loading. everythign is timing out again.

I've removed anything that looked like it vaguely tied in to network settings - xfire and google desktop search got wiped.

I've reinstalled SP2, which did nothing. I reinstalled XP itself over .. err itself, and that hasn't fixed it.

[Rich]

Have you tried making a diff user account on that box? maybe its some borked http-omfg-timeout setting in the registry? Can you do other net things or is it just http?

[andyf]

the damndest thing, it seems to be ok today ( so far ... ) ........