James's Blog

I have ran across this issue twice now, at the same customer location. I found a problem with Vista connecting to a server using a Intel Pro/1000 EB with I/O Accelerator network card.  I have found that by running this command as administrator on the Vista computer that it resolves the issue: netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled.  To verify the settings on the workstation, use the command: netsh interface tcp show global.  When I ran the show command I noticed that Receive-Side Scaling State was enabled. Even though the disabling the auto tuning level resolves the issue you still might need to run this command to disable Receive-Side Scaling State: netsh interface tcp set global rss=disabled.

We did not want to run this command on every Vista computer that was setup on the network so I decided to figure out what setting on the servers NIC was causing the issue. I went to the properties of the Intel Pro/1000 EB with I/O Accelerator and found that Receive-Side Scaling State was a setting under advanced. I disabled this on the network card and it resolved the issue for all of the Vista computers on the network. Here is a pretty good explanation about what causes this problem.

I have also heard that this is a problem with certain switches, netgear in particular.