I came home to find my laptop had rebooted into linux (a much more sane operating system), without any information, I looked at the event log and found that I was being hit by the limit to te number of TCP/IP connections that can be made per second. I hit this when I open a group of bookmarks in firefox! There is more detail here, but the long and short of things is if you attempt to make more than 10 connections in a second you are rate limited, and a message is logged in the event log. It's not tunable in the registry, you need to hack the tcpip.sys file directly. I presume the reason for not allowing the registry hack is to prevent virus writers/trojan horse writers from making alterations to the registry value, thus removing it's capability. Annoying, but work-aroundable. SpeedGuide.net :: Windows XP SP2
