Diagnose ‘N’ Repair This! … And Vista Healed Itself
22 February 2007 in Root | Comments enabled
I’ve had a problem with the university sites and pages not loading properly for about a week now. The problem was that the text did get though, but images as small as 20 kilobytes would take over 4 minutes to load. Initially, I thought that the problem was due to a factor in my connection (gives the ISP a nasty look, for no good reason), but trying the same via the Palosaari campus wide WiFi, I noticed that I was wrong.
Was there any difference in browsers? Opera works fine in Windows Vista (unlike Firefox for the moment) and I reluctlantly tested IE7. No dice there either, a bit faster on the university sites than Opera but only marginally. Pictures didn’t load fast in either browser.
So, back to the drawing board I thought, and fired up Fiddler HTTP debugger and looked at the download times. Pages: just a few milliseconds – Images: several minutes per image. Ok, so, now what? Is it IPv6 that’s the culprit? I managed to find that Opera has some bug with IPv6 websites, but the university page has got no IPv6 address yet. They are still good ol’ IPv4 DNS-ing. A quick disable/enable of the IPv6 stack later and the result was a short and bitter answer: no. Dang! :x
I recalled that the last time I had connectivity issues was when I installed Virtual PC 2004 on Windows XP Pro on the same computer that’s now Vista-ing. The source of the problem was hard to find, but after some Google Groups searching I discovered that VPC2004 had problems with Broadcom’s and Intel’s network drivers. However, with Vista VPC 2007 is the only option and so far I have had zero problems with 2007’s networking.
Just as it happens, I stumbeled upon the solution today: it’s called Network Diagnose and Repair. I clicked on my network connection’s “Diagnose and Repair” expecting nothing, but it found a problem with a TCP setting that wasn’t compatible with my router. After Vista “fixed” itself, the problem was and is gone!
What did it fix? I don’t know for sure, but it seems like it fixed TCP window scaling which some router (maybe mine) was having problems with. In conclusion, I hope that the problem will remain out of sight from now on. 
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