Stardate 20021124.1727

(Captain's log): I've been having a problem off and on which is really a pain. There's something weird about how TCP/IP is working on my computer with IE, possibly including other things.

The server you all reach (which holds this page) is the only thing connected to my cable modem, and it uses the one-and-only IP I have assigned to me. It has two ethernet ports on it, and one hooks to the modem. The other connects to the hub for my LAN, on which four computers sit (two old and rarely used). My "ReplayTV" is also connected to it. All of them talk to the internet through the server, using NAT, and the computers all talk to each other through the ethernet as well.

The server is about 8 feet to my right, and it has activity LEDs on each port, so I can see when people are getting in and I can see my own activity out to the net as well. Sometimes, for some reason or other, IE will wedge and when I click a link it will go busy waiting without actually having bothered sending a request out to the network.

It's odd. I can position the mouse pointer over a link, look at the server, click the link and see that there was no LAN activity at all. Looking back at IE, it will seem to be busy; it will show every indication that it's waiting for a response from something. But it's hard to see how it could get a response since it never sent a request.

When that happens, I can use other tools to do other kinds of network operations successfully (such as using NetLab to do a ping, and doing file sharing between computers). And if I have several IE windows open at once, sometimes some will be paralyzed while others work fine.

I used to have IE set to use "none" for a homepage, and had a lot of grief with starting new IE windows and having them begin in this paralyzed mode. I finally figured out that changing it to load a text-only status page I have set up on my own server would ameliorate that substantially. But that still causes trouble; if I'm in Agent and click a link, and if there's no IE instance already running, it will start running and usually not do anything useful. Before I click in Agent, I have to manually start an IE window and let it load the page from Regulus (my server); then when I click in Agent it will usually load fine. It's really strange, whatever it is.

I thought for a while that the problem might be in AdSubtract, and I'm still not sure it isn't. When this happens I can click AdSubtract and disable it, but that means it still is working as a proxy, it's just supposed to pass things through. (It occurs to me that I've never tried in such a case going into the IE setup frames and actually disabling the proxy there so that IE goes directly to the net. I'll give that a shot next time it happens and see what it does.)

When a given IE window wedges that way, I've never figured out a way to make it come back. Sometimes killing it and switching to other IE windows helps; sometimes I have to kill off every incarnation of IE and start over. Occasionally I've found that I actually have to log off and on again to reinitialize everything before it will begin again.

There's also a sort of half-failure mode, where I can load pages but none of the secondary loads (i.e. graphics files) will happen. The initial text of the page will appeear but every picture on it will be replaced with a place-holder, and the browser will be busy forever waiting to load them.

It's all thoroughly annoying. I was using IE 5.5, but Microsoft's update page for Win2K basically made upgrading to IE 6 mandatory to get certain patches, so that's what I'm using now.

Anyone encounter this before? Any idea what's causing it? It's been going on for months.