I am having a problem with "connection timed out" and it's driving me nutz! I tried asking over in the w2k group but didn't get much help. So I thought I might try the brains that reside here.
It's a new win2k setup with dialup access to the net.
It affects all my programs that access the net - netscape, firefox, thunderbird, xnews, mailwasher....most of which I used on my old system with no problems.
It sometimes acts like it's just too many connections. On my older system, I could load a set of 10 browser tabs at once. Yes, it was slow, but it loaded. Now, some of the sites come back timed out, and those that do load may be missing several images.
Alternatively there are times when I'm simply downloading one file (getright or firefox) and I go to load a simple webpage and I get timed out. The timeout happens in seconds, usually instantly.
Another weird example is loading a website that has advertising. While the page loads, one or more of the ads will show the browsers "connection timed out" error while the rest of the page is still loading. This happens if all I am doing is loading just that one page.
I've used ethereal to examine traffic and I'm noticing two things.
One is that when this happens there's a lot of "ICMP destination unreachable". This always comes on the heals of a "DNS query response" and is being sent by my machine to the DNS server. I mean, it's at the same time to the microsecond. When things run successfully, I may see one or two of these. But when things fail, they come in droves.
Second, using the above example of downloading a file and then trying to load a webpage, it appears the request doesn't even go out. The GET commands never show up in the packets. The web page times out instantly.
I was having problems with my modem anyway, so I changed to my old tried and true USR 56k sportster. No change. (other than the problem the 'new' modem was having - dropped connections from connecting too fast for the noise level on the line)
I have tried different modem drivers. No change. (btw, the modem is known good, having been used on several computers previously)
I did find I forgot to set my DNS servers, but setting this had no effect.
I thought it might be my antivirus, so I uninstalled it. No change.
I thought it might be my firewall (Kerio 4.0). I reluctantly disabled it for a minute and still had the problem.
I've even looked around the registry but nothing obvious seemed to pop up.
All my googling keeps coming up with solutions to specific programs. This is affecting everything, so it's got to be something system level. Heck, it even affects PINGing from a command prompt.
I'm just plain baffled. There's very little here that's new. The modem, OS, and most of the software were used on the old machine. Normally I know what I am doing or can figure it out. This one has had me stumped for weeks now.
Any ideas would be much appreciated.
Brian