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Little background: before going on a business trip I installed all the corporate updates on my winxp laptop (not a great idea). One of them included a new vpn client which might have something to do with the problem.

Anyway, I quickly noticed that I'm having problem with my internet connection i.e. sometimes it looks like I completely lost connection - no websites can be opened (even though I can ping them). This weird behavior can be observed pretty clearly using Putty (ssh). After exactly one minute of being idle I'm losing my connection (when sometime after a minute I type enter I get 'connection reset'). I can get around this in putty by sending keepalives every 55 seconds but it seems like it's connected with my problem browsing websites.

The strange part is that this behavior can only be observed when I'm using a wired connection. When I'm wireless everything is fine and dandy. I'm guessing it's a matter of setting somewhere one parameter, either in windows registry or NIC setting.

Could anyone please help me with this? I'm far away from my office and besides knowing the support desk guys they will reinstall my OS :-(

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you say the problem happens when you're on a wired connection, is your wireless connection active at the time? if so is it connected? – quack quixote Oct 7 '09 at 1:57
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Go to command prompt and type

netsh int ip reset

This should reset the IP stack on your machine, it may break the VPN client or any addon that has tied itself to the networking stack, however you can always reset them and this should allow you to find out what is causing the problems.

Also, you can try just going into the "Network Connections" screen, then right clicking and choosing properties on your network adapter, and just checking to see if any weird addons have been installed as you may be able to disable them this way.

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Thanks! I haven't run this command but I've looked what it does and it resets the registery settings in SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\ . I've looked there and I noticed a weird setting which set the Tcp window size to 64k. I've deleted it and it seems it fixed the problem. – Cid Oct 8 '09 at 21:41
Brilliant, good to know it helped you (if not directly!)... It is one thing to fix problems, but I always wonder what actually creates these bad settings! I wonder if it was your VPN software :S – William Hilsum Oct 8 '09 at 21:50
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