I'd really appreciate some assistance here. For two of these issues I was at it for around 2-3 hours with no result whatsoever, and the other just confuses the heck out of me:

1) GMail.com won't load.

This one is driving me the most nuts. When I say it won't load, I don't mean you get that page with the progress bar on the top-left, and the bar never progresses, I mean the site itself simply times out. The browser just sits there for approximately two to four minutes, and at that point it either gets to the login page for GMail (about 1/4 of the time), or it simply times out.

The user's computer was able to browse to any other website I tried and everything loaded just like normal. I was able to watch HD Vimeo videos, and her Fios connection was getting around 30Mbps on speed tests. I ran CCleaner. I ran several virus scans including ComboFix. I ran HiJack This and didn't see anything weird at all. I tried three different browsers, including a portable version of Chrome I brought on my own thumb drive. I created a new user account in Windows. I tried the existing guest account. I flushed the DNS. I reset the router to defaults. I tried my own laptop and had no problems. I tried pretty much everything I could think of, and nothing worked. I feel like I conclusively determined it wasn't on Verizon's end, it wasn't the NIC, and it wasn't a browser issue. What's left?

2) On the same computer, there are other random slowness issues.

For the most part, it's a decent computer (Dell XPS 430 w/8GB of RAM). Certain things just run terribly slowly, while others just zip along. For instance, loading IE or any of the browsers was instantaneous. But the user showed me that when she opened a photo in some MS photo editing software (not Paint, something that comes with Office I think), and simply tried to crop an image and save it, the program would freeze for several minutes before finally completing its process. It would get there, but not without taking its sweet time. The other points where it seemed to take an extraordinarily long time would be when apps would create system restore points (like ComboFix or Windows update). I tried installing Service Pack 2 (she's unfortunately very out of date on her Vista machine), but it simply timed out.

I'd hate to tell this woman she needs to start fresh, but that might be the only option. If there's anything else that can solve this, though, I'd appreciate knowing it.

3) An unswitchable network.

I'm the IT guy for my family's church. A while back they built a new building and the hub of the network was moved to it. A few connections were run underground from the new building to where the hub used to be in the old building. Essentially I replaced the router with a switch and moved it to the new hub. I hope that's all clear.

Well, last week users in the old building were experiencing very slow internet connections. Instead of their normal 20-30 Mbps, they were getting more like a flaky 1Mbps. But anyone connected in the new building were fine.

The First thing I tried was taking the line terminating in the old building and plugging it right into my netbook. I instantly started getting ~30Mbps. I then plugged that line back in the switch, and connected my netbook to the switch as well. I then got 1.5Mbps. I tried a brand new switch, and the exact same thing happened. What's going on? Why does this thing not like when I have a switch connected to it all fo a sudden?


Thanks for your help on these questions, and sorry for the looong post...