wiinter: Intermittent internet connection is driving me nuts

[wiinter]

Hey, did you ever figure out what the problem was? I'm having the same issue.. I've constructed a doc for forum purposes, trying to add this issue to as many as possible

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To anyone who knows what the hell is going on-

We're having a problem with an intermittent “This page cannot be displayed error in IE. I have a home account that has two machines that are having this problem, and a Shaw business account at the office, where a confirmed 3 of nine machines are having this problem (and we simply haven't tested the others as extensively).

I could describe it as tho it seemed the DNS servers were blinking out every 1-2 minutes for a period of about 10-15 seconds. If you happened to be accessing a new page while this 'outage' occurred, you would get an instantaneous “This page cannot be displayed. And I say instantaneous, because under normal circumstances around that error message, the new page request would usually wait a timeout period of at least a couple seconds before showing the “Page cannot be displayed. But not with this error, it's AS SOON as you click the link or press one of your favorites. Just pressing the refresh button repeatedly will finally display the page when the connection can be made.

Here are the actions I've taken to attempt to solve the problem:
- Restarting, of course, doesn't help
- Cleared IE cache / cookies / etc
- Ensured no LAN settings were checked in IE options (e.g., proxy detection)
- Verified all windows updates were installed
- Disabled software firewall
- Flushed DNS cache via “ipconfig /dnsflush
- HAD CABLE MODEM REPLACED AND LINE CHECKED!

Some notes:
- Called ISP support. They have verified that when pinging my IP, they see timeouts. The odd thing is tho, over a period of about 3 hours, they only saw it timeout 6 times. Where-as, in a period of about 3 hours, I would experience this intermittent web problem about 10-20 times.
- This problem doesn’t seem to affect existing connections, like downloads or game playing. Once the connection is made, it’s fine. I haven’t noticed a large problem with initiating non-web connections, either. But that could still be an issue.
- We have 7 workstations at the office. Three of which are connected directly to a hub that’s connected to our gateway. But the other four have an additional hub that connects to the parent hub that connects to the gateway. These four machines, in the ‘island’ do not experience this issue. But rather, the three machines that have a more direct connection to the gateway ARE experiencing the problem. UNCONFIRMED.

Here are some commonalities between all 5 machines:
- Windows 2000 operating system
- IE 6.0028
- All windows updates installed, and all have automatic updates set up
- Problems started near May 27th (that Thursday is when I can remember first occurrence)
- All machines reside in the same small town

Here are some differences between the 5 machines:
- Three are behind a hardware firewall (have been for 3 years)
- Two are directly connected to the internet, but with software firewall (have tried temporarily disabling, for troubleshooting)
- Three other machines reside 4km away from the other two machines
- WEIRD: After some preliminary testing, with two machines and two users in the same geographical location, the problem doesn’t seem to happen simultaneously

Let me know if you or anyone is also experiencing this problem. When I called in, we seemed to be the only ones affected.

ICQ = 3100493

[alc6379]

In the future, don't piggyback posts. It results in topics getting confusing, and it keeps you from getting the attention you might deserve. :)

[wiinter]

Ah, I was actually just hoping the original creator of the thread would reply, since he was having the exact same problem as me... and since I had a pre-typed message, I figured I'd just paste it in there.

BUT, GOOD NEWS... I figured out the problem.

It ended up being a combination of an old program called Net Medic, and a recent update to IE. The company that originally created Net Medic went under quite awhile ago (maybe 5 years), and I've kept the original installer for this network traffic monitoring tool. I've been using it for almost 7 years now, and on one of the last days of last month, IE became intermittant (as it states in my original post). This issue was from a file called wsock32.dll that Net Medic used, and I'm guessing the original wsock32.dll was updated with the latest IE patch, and now there's conflicts.

It was one of the only similarities between all 5 systems, and upon uninstalling and rebooting, the problem disappeared.

I doubt many will have this same issue, as not many people heard of Net Medic, let alone still use it... soooo, uh.. whatever.

[alc6379]

Great! Now, if someone else has the problem, we'll know for future reference!