Hey Ralph,

The situation you've outlined here is one that I run into *all* of the time at home - if I start tracing to a few targets, or set a lower trace interval, my router (at hop #1) will slowly and surely start to show 100% packet loss.

This isn't unusual behavior, though - some devices just aren't fond of having multiple ICMP echo requests targeted at them. When they start to receive a lot of requests targeted at them in a short amount of time - they'll start to down prioritize them to make way for what they believe to be more important traffic (and thus, start to display packet loss).

As long as this packet loss doesn't seem to be passing through to the hop directly after it (or through your whole route to the final destination), then it's usually nothing to worry about - and you don't need to worry about factoring it into your troubleshooting efforts. If you're interested, we've got a few knowledge base articles that cover this concept in more detail. Have a look here:

http://www.pingman.com/kb/6

And here:

http://www.pingman.com/kb/5

Hopefully this helps out! If you should find yourself with any other questions - just let us know.

-Gary