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I’ve spent the last week with a very very odd networking problem, and all my attempts at figuring it out and fixing it have yielded nothing but more questions than answers.

I first noticed the problem after having taken my network apart because I got a new Rogers VOIP cable box (Rogers Home Phone service) added, and I opted to hook it up myself so I could do a nice wiring job. I got that done and hooked everything back up just the way it was – powered on my firewall/server box, cable modem and router all hooked up just they were before. Things seemed normal until I tried to go to windowsupdate.microsoft.com and my browser stalled half way trying to load it up – refreshes wouldn’t help much, sometimes it would get a bit further, but it never got to loading the ActiveX part of it. Other sites were working fine though which was really confusing.

I thought maybe Windows XP was pwned or something, so I tried Vista – it worked which led me to think XP was in trouble – so I spent countless hours searching for anything – something – that I thought might be the cause. I tried fixing *everything* from network stacks, registry, hardware, drivers, WSH reinstall – you name it. Nothing worked. Then I noticed file transfers were very slow for uploads through XP and Vista, so I got to tinkering with stuff to figure that out.
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Ok, so it’s not so much hacking, but the only thing I learned today that I thought was kind of cool.

I’ve had “channel problems” for like the past 2 years almost (and never got off my ass to call up about it until recently) with just two channels – Showcase Action and Showcase Diva (I didn’t know about Diva until the other day when I figured I’d add it to my fav list, since I normally never watched it, but now it was free and such so why not – just stating this because Showcase Diva is a somewhat “fruity” channel, and single guys should typically not admit to watching it). It was a really odd problem since all my other channels came in fine, and I had no internet problems (I have cable internet). Those two channels would either appear to have severe packet loss, or just appear as nothing (black screen) – not even audio.
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