Ken said:
I 'll try those safe modes again. I did try those and couldn't resolve the
problem, but maybe I missed something and I'll try it again.
- talked to Dell about potential hardware issues, which led me to replace
the NIC, and therefore the system board, twice,
- replaced the patch cord at the computer end and also at the router (we
have a wired network)
- tried unsuccessfully to duplicate the problem on another computer at this
point on the network (I've concluded that it specifically is my PC),
-started applications one at a time to try and see if some interaction was
causing the problem
Some theories and findings that I've learned or tested out:
- According to the network person that moonlights here, he saw in the logs
that I seem to have a network connection that was stopping a lot. That led
me to replacing the patch cables and the NIC/motherboard twice, but that
didn't solve the problem. I went back to look at the logs, but the date only
went up to 9/26/08. I didn't know how to change that, so I don't know if the
network connection is still getting dropped.
- I theorized that maybe the problem was occurring whenever Outlook was
doing a send/receive. However, that's not the case.
- when I sign on to the domain at startup, I seem to always have this
problem. When I disconnect the network cable at startup, and then plug it in
after it has finished booting up, sometimes, but not always, it works okay.
- I'm pretty focused on it being a software problem at this point and not a
hardware problem.
To what does your host connect? A hub, switch, gateway, router, what?
I'm assuming that "at work" means you use Ethernet but I don't know what
your network setup is. Are you directly connected to the Ethernet
network or are you using a VPN to get to the company network while using
DSL to your ISP?
Is there a host within your subnet that responds to pings? Is there a
host in the company network but outside your subnet that responds to
pings? If so, try the following:
ping -n 100 <samesubnethost>
ping -n 100 <othersubnethost>
ping -n 100
www.yahoo.com
The last has you ping a host outside your company network. When a ping
is done, check the packet loss percentage. Anything above 8% will
impact web surfing, anything above 5% will show as slow connections, and
I've seen e-mail clients not like more than 3% loss at which point the
delay to retry the packets causes timeouts.
Have you gone into the properties for the LAN connectoid (Network applet
in Control Panel), right-click on it, and select Repair?
Tried uninstalling any anti-virus software? Using a 3rd party firewall?
What other security software is installed?
I'm not sure what your moonlighting network admin meant by your
connection is "stopping". In Ethernet, you don't send any packets until
and when you want to make a connection and when sending some packets.
What "logs" was he looking at? Were these the Event Viewer logs? If
so, what did the event say?
Did you ever enable the troubleshooting log for Outlook? Enable it,
exit Outlook, delete any %temp%\opm.log (I think that's its name), and
reload Outlook. Then do a mail poll. Disable the troubleshooting log
and exit Outlook. Then go check the log to see when the delay occurred
(i.e., during establish of the mail session, during a command, or what).
Since you mention a company network, I'll assume they are using Exchange
(you never mentioned what type of mail server to which you have Outlook
connect). Try disabling the Exchange caching option in Outlook and
restart it. This changes Outlook from waiting for packets to arrive
from the Exchange server to Outlook returning to the old method of
polling the mail server to check for new mails.
