From: John Beckett 

"Geo."  wrote in message
news::
> I've now confirmed that lots of people are seeing 5mb transfer rates with
> vista over gigabit networks.

Slashdot has a small story on network problems running Vista. There are
some incredibly ignorant comments in many of the posts and linked articles,
with only one or two people knowing what is going on.

It seems that the problem is exactly the same issue that Mike had using his
Linux box to download stuff from Geo's Windows server. The Linux box used
the correct TCP window scale option, but a router somewhere mangled the
option, so incorrect info was forwarded. The Linux box advertised how much
data it could receive ("receive window" buffer size). But the
mangled option meant that the Windows machine got the wrong message  - it
thought no data could be sent, giving stupidly slow networking.

In the same way, it appears that Vista has TCP window scaling enabled by
default (as it should - window scaling has been a TCP standard for over ten
years). However, many cheap SOHO routers, particularly those with SPI
firewalling, do not correctly handle standard TCP behaviour. It appears
these routers mangle the window scale option (and maybe more) as outlined
above.

So, it is likely that Geo's networking issues with Vista, while
frustrating, are actually a problem with a crippled router and/or hardware
firewall. (Hence my earlier comment to capture network traffic.)

One of the few intelligent comments said that if you can't upgrade your
router, you could disable RWIN scaling by running this as an administrator:

netsh interface tcp set global rss=disabled netsh interface tcp set global
autotuninglevel=disabled

Of course by now Geo has completely fangled his Vista setup, so it is not
clear whether the above would be sufficient.

John

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