Hello,
I joined up after reading this thread. I've been experiencing the same issue as other here and thought I would share my situation.
First my PC:
Dell XPS 630i
4GB RAM
GeForce GTX 280 (1GB Video RAM)
Windows Vistaâ„¢ Home Premium (6.0, Build 6001) Service Pack 1
NVIDIA nForce 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet
Second me:
I am a network engineer by trade, specializing in Cisco gear, but I am a bit rusty on the windows side, having not supported it for 7-8 years now. I do however have a very good understanding of the networking side of things, even if I don't know specifically what's under Vista's hood (does anyone?)
I bought the PC at the first of the year, had it about 2 weeks and the HD crashed. On the new HD I loaded Vista, updated all hardware drivers, and loaded Microsoft updates.
Almost immediately the issues started. I'll be browsing, and then connections begin timing out. I have verified that this only seems to effect port 80, and it does not matter what browsing platform I use (EI/FF/Safari). To drive that point home I play a game called Eve Online. It has a web browser inside the game which is NOT an IE wrapper. It is a scratch built implementation, It stops working too, even though I remain in the game.
As others I have verified that non-port 80 TCP/UDP, and ICMP requests work fine. I have a lab with Linux and windows machines, as well as my wife running a business out of the house, and 2 teenagers with their own computers and an XBox. This only effects me.
Since I am connected to a Cisco switch, I have port level diagnostics. They show nothing. Windows event viewer shows nothing.
I would also like to point out that I have never had Zone Alarm loaded and this started before I loaded any anti-Virus software. I did load Malewarebytes' Anti-Maleware as a troubleshooting step as suggested on another forum AFTER the issue started.
Also I can make this problem happen at will. All I need to do is fire up Google maps and start scrolling around. After about 5 minutes I'm done every time. I can also do this by opening a lot of tabs at once in my browser. This suggests to me a limitation in the number of IP connections Vista allows while at the same time neglecting to release unused ones. That's just a guess though, and I'm not sure something like that would be based on ports.
Sorry to say, I have no solutions to offer, just more symptoms.
Finally , it is very interesting to me that a simple Google search shows this to a wide-spread problem that has been going on well over a year, and there is no fix or even acknowledgment from Microsoft on the issue. Having suffered through MS products since MSDOS version 1.x, I don't want to hear that the next version will fix it! Yet I have a funny feeling that will be the 'fix', at least it will be until we make the actual purchase, then the next version will fix everything......