=?Utf-8?B?R0JB?= wrote in
news
hi folks,

have xp/sp3 with 768Ram & 400meghz...have turned off windows
firewall and do not have antivirus at the moment (trying to rule
them out)...

both IE8 (set to all default values) and Firefox will hang during
any significant download. Streaming video in example always
hangs....but so will just some web pages that are particularly
busy.....browses fine for most other sites for awhile but will
also sometimes just hang.

when can't reach a site - xp will pop up offer network diagnostic
feature - - and that will clear up the problem (though a download
has to restart from beginning and still will never complete...

I ruled out IE8 by trying Firefox....and I don't really think it
is a virus........have looked at the logs offered during the
Network Diagnostics and I see a line about semaphore timeout...

anyone knowing about this? would really appreciate some help on
this....


There are a lot of details lacking, but to me the symptoms point to a
MTU value being set too high. The absolute max MTU is 1500 but you
must subtract bytes for headers. Even more bytes must be subtracted
for DSL, and yet more must be subtracted for VPN.

Setting the value too high will force the network to fracture packets
that are too big. This works for a while but soon things get scrambled
and everything halts. This is why this problem is most apparent when
doing downloads.

To rule this out as your problem, change the MTU to an extremely
conservative value of 1300 (assuming you aren't using a dial-up
connection) with the program "DrTCP" available at:
http://www.dslreports.com/drtcp
Run it and set MaxMTU to 1300. Reboot machine. If you problem goes
away, then this is your problem. Otherwise you've ruled this out.

You might try the "Tweak Tool" as well:
http://www.dslreports.com/tweaks

HTH,
John