The machine I was using as my Internet gateway for my home LAN died, so I went out and replaced it yesterday. I ended up with my first Vista machine as a result, and I'm already having a problem.

Although the Internet connection (56K dial-up) works fine on the Vista machine, the others connecting via ICS (all running XP or 98) all experience random data corruption when accessing the Internet. Chunks of HTML on websites will be gibberish, streaks and screwed up blocks appear in images, and files downloaded are corrupt. This is completely random, as reloading several times will cause the errors to move to different areas, and sometimes if lucky, the image/page/file will actually be intact.

The amount of data transfered may have some bearing on the issue, as multiple small images (thumbnails) do not seem to display any corruption, and simple websites rarely have garbled HTML, but complex ones (like Amazon.com, Yahoo! Mail) and any image over about 100Kb tend to. It's possible that is simply because the larger transfers allow more time for the corruption to occur, but it might also indicate that the corruption is occurring within a given HTTP connection, and not within the TCP/IP connection as a whole...

I have not changed anything with my network other than this new computer, and I have not seen any problems with one computer transferring data to another. The issue appears to be limited to ICS.

I did a quick search in Google and on the Forumz here, and I didn't see anything about the issue. I'm using Vista Home Premium if that helps any.

Thanks.

I continued testing, and I've been able to rule out any issue with the network itself. I can stream large MP3 files over the network (served from the ICS host computer) without a single hiccup, while simultaneously downloading 150-300Kb images from the Internet, most of which end up garbled.

I also tried installing the Link Layer Topography update on one of the XP machines, and although it now appears on Vista's network map, it still has the random data corruption issue.

I'm going to try a new modem next. Once again I an disappointed in modern computers' inability to simply function.

Sharing a 56K dial-up connection with 2+ computers is going to be slow... painfully slow. (Hell, dial-up is painfully slow for me on just one computer... but I digress...) This, more than anything, is the issue. Vista steals a little more bandwidth for itself than 98 or XP, so with a dial-up connection, it's no surprise that the internet is choking badly on the other computers. If you had broadband, you'd likely not notice a thing.

The issue is not speed. The problem is random corruption of the incoming data packets from the Internet. I can get everything to load, it's just that pictures have junk data garbling them, files are corrupt and unusable, and web pages sometimes have bits of HTML and CSS data missing or corrupted. This only happens on a machine using ICS to access the Internet. The Vista machine itself, no matter how slow it is going, does not corrupt data. This issue also did not exist when the XP machine was serving as ICS host, even with 6 computers on the LAN.

It's very annoying, as the corrupt images are considered to be intact by the web browser, so if I reload the page, the corrupt versions are drawn from the cache, and if I Shift-Reload, I have to reload everything, which means something else will usually get corrupted. It also makes file downloads impossible, and effectively defeats one of the prime functions of my LAN, which is that I can have my Dial-up connection at whatever computer I'm using.