Turns out that the problem I had with my ADSL connection was related to the MTU (Maximum
Transmission Unit) defined on my NIC. This is the default packet size used to send
and receive information through the network you’re connected to. The funny thing was
that I thought this setting would simply affect performance on my connection, but
instead a variety of packets were being dropped because they couldn’t be received
by my PC.
I used an interesting little tool called DrTCP to
change the setting. Cute little app; beats messing around in the registry, especially
if you’re helping someone change it over the phone 🙂