Menekali  Just another IT Blog.

Recently, a number of our Windows XP computers at the office (all of them actually) suddenly stopped sending out SMTP traffic, and stopped authenticating secure websites. This meant no one could log into Yahoo!, MySpace, Facebook, Ebay, Lexis Nexis , or any website for that matter that required SSL traffic or authentication.

It was really perplexing as it did not effect our Windows Vista computers. Now I had done all the research I could on the matter. I tried to dig the deepest depths of the internet and Google to find an answer.

Nothing I found worked. I cleared the cookies, checked our ciphers, reverted back to a date before it occurred, used firefox (we all used it anyway), made router tweaks… everything I could do, and everything everyone else had done just wouldn’t work.

In the few forums I had found information on this at, I noticed after a while people had given up, or just stopped responding. A lot of the times it was something simple like Nortons blocking the network traffic. I also checked my port 443 on our server, and double checked our UDP traffic. Nothing seemed to work! I was going crazy trying to figure this out!

Finally I fixed it though! And I think that this will work for many people who have sadly resorted to formatting their computers.

I had done some research into our MTU settings on not only our router, but our individual computers routers. I also remembered that we have a bit of line noise on the company DSL. I lowered the MTU settings on each individuals computer, anv voila! It works now! This is how I did it:

1. I downloaded DR.TCP.
2. I changed my settings to the following (even if they are blank fill it in with these): Screen shot of settings.
3. Restart

Voila! It worked! All of our computers are now able to access the major websites, and do everything as before. And the interned speed is a bit quicker as a result of the smaller header information going over the noisy internet line to boot!

I hope this helps. If you stumble across this, and still have questions, please let me know!