Internet browser issue / access - Tech advice needed!

[ratzz]

Hi all,

I'm having a problem with my browsers, and its driving me MAD.

I get disconnected from internet access (just my browsers) after about 20 minutes of being online.

Now here is the funny thing -- I can access messenger and send messages, listen to the radio through the BBC radio player, but cannot get access to the internet - both through Firefox & IE.

My laptop does not have a problem connecting through my wireless router to the internet, and the router does not disconnect from the internet, so the issue seems to be isolated to my main PC.

I am pretty sure that it can't be a firewall issue because:

1. I have internet access through the radio player (which is played in a Firefox browser window)
2. I have internet access through messenger
3. I have completely disabled all firewalls
4. I can get internet access for a limited amount of time

I have closed all non major background programmes and disabled programmes from msconfig.

Has ANYONE any ideas before I through this PC out of my window!!!

Thanks guys ...

[lharles]

That sounds pretty odd.

You might want to check firmware for your router, if you have one.  I had a similar situation with my router a while back.  My connectivity was fine for short periods of time but would disconnect randomly on certain ports/within certain functions.  Otherwise it was fine.  A firmware flash fixed the problem for me.



Hope that helps or at least gives ya' somewhere to look!

[JackTucky]

Do you have a cisco VPN Client installed?  Some installations of the client contain some zone alarm DLL's that will kick on after a certain number of minutes.

I had the exact same problem.

=J

[ratzz]

Thanks for that guys ...

It looks like my problem lies with corrupt WINSOCK (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winsock) registry settings.

There are a few small freeware programmes out there (I won't recommend them, because I don't want to mess up peoples network settings).

I'm keeping an eye on things and monitoring the situation!!

Thanks again ... 

[ChadTower]

That happens to me at home when I'm seeding torrents.  I've noticed that when seeding my connection "drops" every few minutes.  Not for long, maybe 20 seconds, but long enough to cause the torrent client to spend a couple of minutes reestablishing peer connections and thus completely throttling the torrent dataflow.  These drops don't seem to happen when I have no torrent client open.  My educated guess is that Comcast is doing this to torrent users specifically to address p2p sharing/traffic without alienating customers.

When my modem cycles this often my router doesn't always do a perfect job of reestabishing its connection.  Sometimes this results in a really slow speed.  Other times it results in certain protocols not working - http/https is one of them.  Usually a full reboot of the modem, followed by one of the router, will clear this up for a while before the torrent throttling begins again.

I figured I'd bring that up... it may be that you don't actually have a corruption problem.  It could be your ISP and your usage patterns, and with so many moving pieces, they just get out of sync.

[jbox]

ditto

However I've often wondered if the cheaper modem/routers might also have slightly crappy implementations of a NAT cache too. Like a round-robin that always just assumes you aren't going to have 100+ TCP connections open simultaneously and so starts to over-write data for entries that are still being used. I only wonder this because for me it is definitely linked to number of connections not the actual data rate, because I find the problem doesn't occur very often if I restrict Azureus to < 100 connections regardless of overall speed, but it occurs repeatedly if I try to push 150+ connections on some really obscure torrents where most peers must be on dialup because they only seem to have a down/up speed of 1kbs. 

[ChadTower]

Hrm.  I don't see a difference if I have 1 torrent or 15 open, but maybe the number of connections per torrent could have an effect.  I suspect it's an all or nothing thing, though - any torrents running through the gateway and they're going to slap you.  Much easier to implement.