I've been trying to document a intermittant latency/packet loss problem with my ISP and have run into problems with Pingplotter (ver 2.41). The problem is that it's reported 100% packet loss on several occassions when there was no packet loss at all.

The way I discovered this was once, a few days ago, when I exited a game (Desert Combat), I saw that according to PP, my internet was down (100% packet loss and unable to resolve DNS past the second hop) - and according to the graph, it had been that way for quite a long time.

I opened a browser and it went to the web site with no problem - my internet was obviously not down.

Then I opened a DOS window, and ran a tracert to the same address (Yahoo.com) - it came back okay till the last couple hops, when it timed out.

I restarted PP on a new IP, and it showed no packet loss, and pings in the 30 ms range.

While I was in Desert Combat, the game was responding normally with no appreciable lag.

This same sort of problem has cropped up several more times in the past couple days - most recently this morning. According to PP, my internet went down at about 12:30 AM and stayed down until when I got up at about 6 AM.

Witout restarting PP, I opened a browser and found my internet to be responding normally - even though PP said I had 100% packet loss and was unable to resolve past the second hop.

I then restarted PP to a new IP, and it reported the connection to be normal - pings in the 30 ms range with no packet loss.

What's going on here? These inconsistent, inaccurate results make it impossible for me to use PP to document the actual problems that exist - I can't separate the real problems from the false reports.

I've used PP before and never had problems like this - it's a great program and an essential tool for network diagnostics.

My setup: 4 computers all running Win XP Home networked with Cat 5e 10/100 Ethernet using a Linksys BESFR41 router connected to a cable modem. The cable system uses local addresses for the first hop - it's 10.101.0.1

What is happening? Is it getting stuck in a loop or something? Is there a patch to cure this?

Thanks. You've got a great product.

Mike Pellegrini

PS: I save the samples, so if you would like to look at the pictures, I can send them to you.

Hi, Mike.

We've had some reports in the past where Windows' TCP/IP stack doesn't allow data to continue after some period of outage. Can you send your data to us at support@pingplotter.com so we can compare your case with this scenario? Also, please let us know your operating system.

This situation has been pretty impossible to reproduce, so we've not been able to address it. If you start the command line "ping" utility to your target with the -t parameter, you might see the same results with that utility.

- Pete