I have read the other threads on this issue. My problem is not Ping Plotter (which I've used for a while and purchased license copy), my problem is tracert itself returns 100% packet loss.

I do not run any local Firewall, I hvae tried stopping all unecessary services, I have rolled back icmp.dll, tracert.exe, winsock.dll, wsock32.dll still no combination of files solves the issue. I am running Win2kPro, I am not behind any firewall.

I don't know when this started happening as I bounce back and forth between a lot of troubleshooting tools.

Is there a way to control whether tracert uses UDP or ICMP packets ? Or can anyone tell me what dll's are involved using MS tracert so I can check all dates and make sure non of these other tools changed anything.

I am about to give up on this.....

Hi, Maghnus.

Based on your problem description, I can't see if you're saying that PingPlotter is working and TraceRT is not, or if PingPlotter and TraceRT both don't work, so you're not blaming PingPlotter.

In some cases, we find that ISPs start blocking ICMP echo requests. If that happens, there's no configuration or rollback you can do to get things working, as your ISP itself completely blocks some portion of the packets we rely on to do a traceroute.

I'm not familiar with the major dependencies of TraceRT, so I used the great TaskInfo 2003 tool. It listed the following dependencies when TraceRT was running under my WinXP box:


Lots of DLLs there - you might want to grab TaskInfo 2003 and see which DLL's your version of TraceRT is using. Again, I suggest looking to your ISP first, though.

TraceRT doesn't support UDP packets at all - only ICMP packets.

If you have 2 computers there, you might try running tracert to the other computer's IP address. If this shows some result, then you know your computer is working OK. Also, checking if TraceRT works on the other computer is a good verifier of where the problem is.

I'm not sure if PingPlotter is working or not here, so I talked mostly about TraceRT. If there's anything we can do to help, please let us know.

- Pete

Thanks for the prompt response.

Tracert and Ping Plotter both are not working from my workstation. Tracert and Ping Plotter work from other hosts same OS on same network so I am convinced the problem is my workstation. Thanks for the dll's involved view. From the looks of it there are too many involved for me to spend the time going through them all and too much of a chance of causing additional problems.

Hi, Maghnus.

Based on experience of other users and your descriptions:

Double, Triple, and Quadruple check for a firewall, or some piece of software that is acting as a firewall. We've had numerous people report that they were having the same problem, and then found some piece of software that installed a firewall of some kind.

Places to check:

• On your network card's protocol list. Some services (like the AT&T Network Client VPN software) install a new service associated with each network adapter which can filter out ICMP.
  
• In your task list (ie: TaskInfo 2003)
  
• In the control panel "Services" applet.
  
• Examining your list of recently installed software. I often do this by sorting my Program Files directory by date, then look for anything that might be network related, or that might have had the opportunity to cause a ruccus (ie: I don't know what it is).
  
• Others? There are probably other good places to look here, but I can't immediately think of them.

We've heard this same complaint a number of times, and in every case where the user has reported back to us, it's been some kind of software running on the PC - and not a DLL conflict.

As a note, PingPlotter's UDP and RawSockets mode depend only on the Winsock stack, and you'd get an error in PingPlotter 2.50 if it was unable to construct these packets correctly.

- Pete