Recently, my Outlook Express client stopped connecting to port 110 of the machine that hosts my mail. 110 is pop3. I tried telneting to port 110, and it acts as if the port does not exist. However, a tech on their end had no problem connecting to 110, no problem using his outlook client to read mail. He says it looks like a firewall problem. Any clues??

Calvin

Perhaps it's a firewall problem.

Seriously, though, do you get a connection refused type error or does it time out? Can you telnet to other POP3 servers? (Try mail.telocity.com -- it should allow the connection, at least, I think.)

Are you running XP? Isn't there some sort of builtin firewall? Maybe it got turned on somehow. Or is this at work and your net admins did something?

I found a similar problem with OW, with the addition that it stopped talking to news servers as well. I tried different email and newsgroup clients and had no problems at all, so I took this as the last straw and stopped even trying to use OE...

I've also found that my connection totally stops responding after a random interval. The line is still up, but my PC can't find anything outside my home - no DNS servers, no nothing. This is all on a very fresh install of XP.

Bryan.

Or you may have spyware which is buggering about with your connectivity. Try Ad Aware for a free checkup.

Might not be, nearly all Microshaft products have a tendency to screw up on a fairly regular basis, but it has to be worth a try.

I've seen similar problems with XP networking [I had it on 2 PCs at home both running XP Home edition] over Xmas/New Year.

The 'fix'/work around is to enable the 'show icon in notification area when connected' option for your Local Area Network Connection [do this via the properties of the network connection]. you can get to your networking setup quickly by right clicking on "My Network Places" on your desktop and selecting Properties [not many people know that], or via Control Panel.

Then when your PC has stopped communicating right click on the network icon on your system tray (aka Notification Area) and select the 'Repair' option. It will go off and do some stuff and come back and report 'network is repaired', then your PC should start communicating over the LAN/WAN again.

Every time a coconut on my 2 XP machines that fixed the problem for a random period of time.

But it proved I had a problem with XP and not something else. I think it is a ARP cache issue, in that whenever I checked with "arp -a" my ARP entries were all gone - including the DNS gateway box [a Nokia DSL router].
The network Repair option made pings to my DSL router work again.

In the end I disabled half the networking protocols and ensured that it was running the bare minimum protocols and the problem stopped happening.
I use fixed IP addresses so I know its not DHCP.

I also was running VMWARE on one of the boxes but the other wasn't so I can't finger VMWARE as the culprit.

I think the problems only showed up once I enabled netowrking in my XP boxes to other Windows PCs on my home LAN.

This may help you stop going crazy and/or help you track down the problem, while giving you a useful workaround in the meantime.

I'll give it a whirl, thanks.

Since these problems started I'd gone back to using 98 whenever I wanted to download somthing of any size. It would be far better if I didn't have to!

Bryan.