I am having a very strange problem with the network stack on my main WinXP machine. The problem is very (ok, very, very) vaguely empeg related

Every couple of days the machine will fail to be able to talk to certain websites. One of the websites is empegbbs.com , hence the tenious empeg connection.

When this happens none of the browsers on the machine will be able to reach the effected sites. I have tried with both IE and Firefox, the problem is the same on both.

It looks like a problem at the TCP level as the browsers just take a long time to timeout. However if I telnet to port 80 on empegbbs.com and request the root of its default website I get the data I expect (not the empegbbs site as I didn't bother to send the correct host header). That would suggest it is not at the TCP level.

I can fix the problem by disabling and re-enabling the Ethernet interface on my machine.

The only think I can think of is some odd MTU discovery problem, but other than that I am stumped. I guess I really need to do some sniffing when it happens next.

Anyone seen anything like this before ?