"connection timed out" problem

I am having a problem with "connection timed out" and it's
driving me nutz! I tried asking over in the w2k group but
didn't get much help. So I thought I might try the brains
that reside here.

It's a new win2k setup with dialup access to the net.

It affects all my programs that access the net - netscape,
firefox, thunderbird, xnews, mailwasher....most of which I
used on my old system with no problems.

It sometimes acts like it's just too many connections. On my
older system, I could load a set of 10 browser tabs at once.
Yes, it was slow, but it loaded. Now, some of the sites come
back timed out, and those that do load may be missing several
images.

Alternatively there are times when I'm simply downloading one
file (getright or firefox) and I go to load a simple webpage
and I get timed out. The timeout happens in seconds, usually
instantly.

Another weird example is loading a website that has advertising.
While the page loads, one or more of the ads will show the
browsers "connection timed out" error while the rest of the page
is still loading. This happens if all I am doing is loading
just that one page.

I've used ethereal to examine traffic and I'm noticing two things.

One is that when this happens there's a lot of "ICMP destination
unreachable". This always comes on the heals of a "DNS query
response" and is being sent by my machine to the DNS server. I
mean, it's at the same time to the microsecond. When things run
successfully, I may see one or two of these. But when things
fail, they come in droves.

Second, using the above example of downloading a file and then
trying to load a webpage, it appears the request doesn't even
go out. The GET commands never show up in the packets. The web
page times out instantly.

I was having problems with my modem anyway, so I changed to my
old tried and true USR 56k sportster. No change. (other than
the problem the 'new' modem was having - dropped connections
from connecting too fast for the noise level on the line)

I have tried different modem drivers. No change. (btw, the modem
is known good, having been used on several computers previously)

I did find I forgot to set my DNS servers, but setting this had
no effect.

I thought it might be my antivirus, so I uninstalled it. No change.

I thought it might be my firewall (Kerio 4.0). I reluctantly
disabled it for a minute and still had the problem.

I've even looked around the registry but nothing obvious seemed
to pop up.

All my googling keeps coming up with solutions to specific programs.
This is affecting everything, so it's got to be something system
level. Heck, it even affects PINGing from a command prompt.

I'm just plain baffled. There's very little here that's new. The
modem, OS, and most of the software were used on the old machine.
Normally I know what I am doing or can figure it out. This one
has had me stumped for weeks now.

Any ideas would be much appreciated.

Brian

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