Random Connectivity Hiccups

I use the word hiccup, because that's pretty much what it is. Sometimes I can connect to a site and other times (regardless of browser) it says it cannot connect. It's not specific to any certain websites. This is very annoying because often times when I am attempting to go to a website and get the "cannot connect" message it's a constant refresh refresh refresh until it can connect.

I am running Windows XP Service Pack 3 and I did Update Windows and also had an update for my AVG Antivirus (I believe it was an update from version 8 to 9) occur before this issue arose.

The Windows Updates were:

Windows XP Update for Windows XP (KB979306) Friday, March 05, 2010 Microsoft Update
Windows XP Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 Service Pack 2 Update for Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP x86 (KB976570) Friday, March 05, 2010 Microsoft Update
Windows XP Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Service Pack 2 Update for Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP x86 (KB976569) Friday, March 05, 2010 Microsoft Update
Windows XP Update for Windows XP (KB976662) Friday, March 05, 2010 Microsoft Update

I feel like I've been able to narrow it down to SOMETHING on this computer and not on the network itself. I got to that conclusion through information and some testing. The information involves the fact that no one else in the house of 2 other people besides me that uses the internet has had issues. They are always connected wirelessly to the router (I'm directly wired to the router from this computer through a switch). The test basically just involved me using my laptop through the same switch this computer connects to and I didn't get a single "can't connect". While doing stuff on my laptop this computer was physically disconnected from the internet while it scanned for malware using your guide for the scans save for running ComboFix and MGTools. I ran Ad Aware also which also did not return anything.

I've taken some other measures too to make sure it wasn't the updates or my network card's driver by uninstalling and reinstalling AVG, those aforementioned Windows Updates, and updating the network card's driver. I even tried using the internet for a little bit with AVG disabled from starting up on startup (with a little help from the program Autoruns) (I know it's dangerous but for testing purposes I felt like I needed to eliminate the AVG possibility), this still produced the same results. Obviously, the problem still persists.

I also ran a trace route through the command line not only on this computer, but on a computer someone else uses in the house and the only area it gave anything odd was after it listed the router's IP and before it showed the ISP's stuff which gave me the asterisks(*) and if i remember the message exactly it was "request timed out". The thing is that it doesn't appear that that is an issue considering others in the house haven't had the same issues I have.

Please try and help me out with this as swiftly as possible there's a lot I need to do on a daily basis with my internet especially with a browser and I don't want that to build up too high. Thank you.

 

Could you do a system restore to a date before 3/5? I would suspect that it wont help....but should give it a try anyway.

 

Unfortunately no. I have System Restore off. I felt like it gave me more problems in the past than it helped so I tend to just keep it off.

 

Oh well.

When you wire your laptop to the network are your DNS entries on the laptop the same as the machine giving problems?

 

I'm not sure of how to check those. I did try this in the command line though on this computer that I think involved DNS:

ipconfig /flushdns
net stop dnscache
net start dnscache

 

Ipconfig /all

 

Oh that haha. As far as the IP numbers yes save for the obvious IP number assignment for the computer. The only other difference is on here the DNS Suffic Search List does not show on this computer as it does on the other and the Connection-specific DNS Suffix is left blank on this computer whereas on my laptop it shows the host for my IP.

The other differences between the laptop and this computer is that this one runs XP whereas the laptop runs Vista and also the laptop can handle IPv6 and this computer can only handle IPv4.

 

OK....so what we are looking at here is TCP/IP problems after 3/5. Correct?

Has the ethernet cable been changed?

My next suggestion is go to device manager and find the network card. Delete it and restart Windows. Only do this if you have the drivers for your ethernet card. Windows will more than likely find it and load the proper driver but if it doesn't it is best to have the driver on hand.

 

Yes it seems that it is an issue with TCP/IP.

The Ethernet cabling is pretty new maybe only a year old or so. There were previous issues I was having that had to do with a malware situation and we had replaced the cabling before figuring out that it was indeed Malware.

I went to the Device Manager and right-clicked the Ethernet card's entry and clicked Uninstalled and Windows successfully reinstalled it after the restart.

Unfortunately the problem still persists. When navigating back to majorgeeks it occurred again. This time it had sent me to the default search if a domain happens to "not exist" which it obviously should. Also, sometimes images or items that SHOULD load on a web page don't always in relation to this issue also and that has also occurred.

 

Have you tried pinging the site in the comand prompt, so you can narrow down the problem a bit further. It could be an issue with IE or something, not necessarily TCP/IP.

 

I'm not sure how to do that.

I don't see how it could just be IE because this also occurs on Firefox and Opera.

 

I'm not sure if it could be a TCP/IP issue either though because the laptop works fine yet this one does not on the same type connection setup. The only thing that would cause that to be untrue is if one of the Ethernet cables that go to the switch are problematic from this computer or the Network Card is the issue.

The only other thing aside from the above that it could be is software-based (outside of the browsers) or obviously Windows and possibly the .NET updates produced the issue.

 

If all that is recommended here does not work obviously the only other thing I can fathom to do is try and see if there is something that can remove all .NET related items on this computer and reinstall them all and if that doesn't work then obviously to format the OS drive and start over.

This is why I came here first to try and get any other possibilities eliminated first before I go ahead and do something as drastic as the above. Ideally I would prefer doing the above before I ever get to the point of buying new wiring or a network card.

 

Sure it can be a TCP/IP issue.....the stack in the computer not external. By removing the network card in device manager the driver and the TCP/IP stack will be rebuilt upon boot up.

 

That makes sense. Is there anything else I can do to try and fix this problem or try and figure out what exactly the problem is?

 

There is a good possibility that removing the network card in device manager and rebooting your machine may fix your problem.

I wouldn't mess with the .NET stuff because there are lots of pages on the Internet about how to fix .NET after certain revisions are removed and reinstalled.

 

Tried that as stated above lol .

 

It appears that it could not have been the Network card either. I had another working Network card on this computer so I switched up which one I was using and it still produced the same results.

It seems it either has to do with something software-based or it has to do with the wiring that connects the switch to this computer.

 

Another interesting note. I actually DJ online also which involves streaming music to a server. This involves needing a constant sending of information to the server and when using this computer today that has the problems on it was able to stream for the whole 2 hours without any problems at all.

It's looking more and more to me like it's something to do with a software-based issue than anything with hardware or wiring issues.

Also when trying to load a playlist into SAM Broadcaster (the streaming software I use to DJ with) it gave me this error: "Unhandled exception (Unable to complete network request to host "localhost". Failed to establish a connection. An invalid argument was supplied.)"". When installing SAM Broadcaster it also requires that a database software system be installed also (probably for storing locations of songs on the hard drive). These databases are never connected to anything outside of the computer as far as I know and considering that after SAM Broadcaster produced that error it was unable to load the playlist as it usually would have been able to do. My guess is that it was trying to connect to a dummy server (that would allow for connecting to the local database) on the machine used by SAM Broadcaster that would use localhost. I've never had this error ever until the website connections issue arose.

Unfortunately the recommendation of Uninstalling the Network Card from the Device Manager and restarting and installing it back again did not work, as stated long beforehand in this post. Is there anything else I can do to try and get this figured out...or even solve the problem?

 

I decided to go ahead and just backup everything important and format my OS drive. I felt like it had been narrowed down to some issue with Windows and didn't want anymore stuff I needed to do to build up any more.

Everything is back to normal now so it appears something with Windows was probably the issue. Thank you for your help.

 

Thank you for getting back. Good luck.