[Struggling_here]

Hi there

I am very sad to say that the things you told me to do on the Hijack this forum, whilst cleaning my PC, did not cure the problem, so, at your request I have moved it here. I have no idea if you will be able to think of anything else. After all I have lived with this problem for months, and it is not that bad to cope with, but obviously it can be a nuisance. I suppose the biggest worry was that it was in some way infected but we seem to have shown that it isn't.

Just in case you can think of anything else, here are a few observations which I may not already have made.

1. I am in UK and my ISP is NTL. This comes to my house by cable, and I then send it through a Netgear router which is designed for cable rather than DSL input. This router provides wired and wireless connections for PCs. I currently have 3 PCs connected by wires and 2 laptops wirelessly.

When this problem occurs it stops all email EXCEPT that from NTL itself, though right now (the problem exists at this moment of writing) even that is stopped (though I guess their email server may be down). I have 2 ntl email addreses and they still check OK. For a long time I assumed this was therefore an NTL problem until it transpired one day that the other PCs on the network were not similarly affected. Then I concluded it was a problem specific to my PC.

FTP to all servers that I have tried also stops working, though I admit I have not tried ftp to an NTL server, as I don't have any cause to use their free webspace and I am not sure of the details but I guess I could set this up so that I could try it next time it goes down (It has just come back up)

2. This does not happen at any particular time of day, though it seems to come around lunch time more than any other time. The latest occurrence just now was around 8.30 am

3. My PC is a SONY VAIO PCV-RX4 series with an INTEL Pentium 4 2.4Ghz processor and 1.25 Gb RAM. I know that SONY do have some strange little quirky security settings of their own about which I know nothing, but wonder if this might give you a line of enquiry?

4. As far as I am aware, this phenomenon didn't start coincidentally with the addition of any software or any change to the network structure etc., though I appreciate it could have done and I just didn't notice.

5. Sometimes when it happens it eliminates email (non-NTL), ftp, remote desktop connection and SSL sites, other times it only eliminates the email and ftp and the other 2 seem to carry on working.

6. Normal http:// browsing has never been affected.

7. I can still send email

8. (Not likely relevant) I run 3 monitors on this PC with desktop shared across them

Please let me know if there is anything else I can tell you that might help.

 

[johnwill]

Well, offhand this sounds like some sort of restrictions that your ISP is putting on the account.

 

[Struggling_here]

I also thought this for months, but have recently discovered that the other PCs on the network - using the same internet through the same router - are not similarly affected, which suggests to me that it is a problem specific to this PC.

Restarting the PC when this starts sorts it out too, where I would have expected the restriction still to be there if it was imposed by my ISP.

I did go to them first, but, as is my experience with ISPs, the folk that answer the technical helplines have very little knowledge and can really only read from scripts, as they are not supplied with the knowledge to take things further than that, and seem disinclined to put you on to someone who can. I don't like to generalise aginst these folk, simply to state what my experience has been.

I do have a lot (20+) of email addresses that are not belonging to my ISP (good job at the moment as their mail server seems to have been down for over 24 hours!) and these check every 10 minutes on Outlook Express on this PC, where the others only check 1 or 2. Might this make a difference?

Do my observations above make sense to you?

 

[johnwill]

I can't say. I have a bunch of different email addresses on numerous sites, and I check them all every 5 minutes. I've never seen anything like this...

 

[Struggling_here]

Any chance there is someone there who might have a clue at all?

 

[JamesO]

Need more details.

You are using Outlook Express to access 20+ different e-mail accounts, correct??

Who is the e-mail provider and where are they located? G-mail, Yahoo Mail, AOL mail?? Where is the mail server physically located? If you do not know, we will sort this later.

How do you access the e-mail accounts? POP3, IMAP or other?

What POP/SMTP ports are you using??

Do you get repeated passwork pop up windows from Outlook Express at times?

My guess is you have at least 1 specific e-mail account you are accessing with Outlook Express that is not responding and it may be causing a slow down with your e-mail routine?? If you are accessing e-mail account servers that are not local in the UK, you may be expierencing network latency problems as well.

Please provide as many details as you can regarding what you are doing and trying to do.

JamesO