Hi,

Since the round of updates a couple of months back, I've had the
following problem. I'm on XP Pro SP2 with ALL updates applied and use
Norton firewall and anti-virus.

After a variable amount of time, from a few hours to about a day, It will
not make any new connections to internet sites. Existing connections
continue to work as long as you don't break them and attempt a re-connect.
I'm on 56k dialup (only higher speed option where I live is an $870 per
month T-1 or going satellite) and I've even had it happen just after I
started a 19 MegaByte ftp upload using ws_ftp. I could't make any new
connections, but the upload ran for over 2 hours and finished uploading
the file, then downloaded the destination directory listing and timed out
the ftp connection because it had nothing else to do.

I've tried this on an internal modem (SMLink), an external Modem
(SupraExpress 56) and IIRC, it even exihibited this behaviour on an
ethernet modem (Webramp), which I no longer have. I have multiple ISP's and
it doesn't seem to be ISP dependant, either.

Existing connections to http, pop3, ftp, nntp, and such work until the
connection is broken because of normal conditions (ftp finished and session
ended normally, Agent ran out of things to download from usenet and timed
out, mail/spam finished downloading, etc).I don't recall if I've ever had
an SSH connection open when this happened. I use Putty for ssh.

I'll have to check the next time, but I'm not sure if DNS lookups or
traceroutes still work. Once connections stop working, even trying to
establish a connection to a specified IP address for ftp or ssh rather than
going through DNS lookup doesn't work. I've been rebooting a couple of
times a day to avoid the problem. I've run windows update and office update
regularly, but there are no critical, non-critical, or driver updates
showing. I also have auto updates turned on.

Prior to that round of updates, I could go weeks without rebooting my WinXP
Pro system. My pattern of usage hasn't increased. It doesn't seem to be
consistant on how much time is involved, so I'm guessing that it's stopping
working after a specific number of connections. I'm a heavy internet user.
BTW, my system has 768 Meg of DDR RAM, 80 GB Seagate 7200 RPM IDE HD,
Celeron 2.3 Ghz, Intel 845 chipset motherboard with Intel graphics (I'm not
a gamer). About a month before the round of updates which seemed to start
this, I upgraded my HD and reloaded WinXP from scratch. Fortunately, I have
SP2 on CD (ordered directly from Microsoft) so I didn't have to download it
to apply it. It worked fine until the next round of patches from microsoft.
WinXP Pro came with the machine and passes the validation test for updates.
It's an eMachine D2386. I haven't messed with the registry or run a tweak
program.

Has anyone else experienced this problem or have a hint about how to fix
it?

TIA,

-- David