Everytime you look, there seems to be another new critical network security
patch after another that gets introduced by Microsoft to seal
vulnerabilities. I keep up with them religiously , mainly because I don't
know any better, and I figure if Microsoft says that I need them badly, then
I need them badly.

However, I've been noticing this month that there's been some strange
behaviour by various network-centric applications. For example, if I start
various P2P applications (such as Emule, Shareaza, etc.) that other common
network-centric apps (such as Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, etc.) and
the whole computer itself start to freeze up for variously long periods of
time. Eventually, they'll come back to life. It's almost as if you're
watching a machine that doesn't have enough CPU power, but looking at the
Taskman graphs, it doesn't look like the CPU is being overtaxed. So some
other resources must be being overtaxed, and I'm thinking that its the
Windows' TCP/IP stack itself. Is it possible that all of these Microsoft
critical network patches are making the whole stack work less efficiently? I
think the only thing that's common here is that these P2P applications open
up a lot of simultaneous connections (I confirmed this with the Tcpview
program).

However, I don't think any of these P2P applications are doing anything
differently than what they always used to do. They'd always opened lots of
simultaneously connections in the past too, but I never saw the computer
start to get unresponsive.

Yousuf Khan

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