I fairly often get a similar result with my setup, two to five machines on one dialup connection; but I thought my system was so obsolete nothing like that could happen on a modern broadband setup.

I have one machine that connects to the ISP via it's internal modem, and is set up to "share" its connection via the Windows built-in ICS (Internet Connection Sharing). Any other machine plugged into my 10/100BaseT LAN is supposed to be able to call on that machine to pass Internet stuff back and forth. All other machines (except the ICS host) are set to connect via "Local Network."

The ICS host machine frequently "forgets" that the other machines are there, and fails to answer them and/or to pass anything to the ICS server. 127.0.0.1 is the default address that the host machine assumes. It has a very primitive DNS naming utility to assign 127.0.0.x addresses to the other machines, but they're temporary assignments and the host apparently drops them at random intervals.

Frequently when the host gets absent-minded the "host" machine can continue to communicate with the web, but other machines get "Page not found" or "Cannot Connect" - or just sit there "waiting." The limited error messages that come back to a "user" machine mostly are the same ones you'd get if there was a problem with the website, and one must infer (i.e. guess) that the problem is actually with the "ICS host."

Our usual fix is just to go to the ICS host machine and "disconnect" the modem. The restored connection seems more reliable if one of the "user" machines then opens a browser, to make the ICS host "dial on demand" to make the web connection. (Rebooting the ICS host machine usually will work also, but our "host" is a Win2K that can take up to 15 minutes to reboot.)

My impression is that most broadband connections that are intended to allow connection sharing do the share management in the broadband interface device; but there seems to be quite a variety of systems and one might get a "simplified" system that behaves similarly to the Microsoft ICS. The solution probably would be to "reboot" (or otherwise re-start) the device that manages sharing.

This does not explain the "connect to every other site but one," but we have noted that the ICS frequently drops out when the ICS host machine connects to specific web pages that have no apparent "peculiar properties." (Other than being "web games" "SHE" insists on playing when I'm in the middle of an umpty-MegaByte download.) On dial-up the ICS can't recover just by going to a different page than the one that "triggered" the interruption, since the ICS host modem doesn't recognize that the connection is gone. It's necessary to manually disconnect and re-dial. A slightly more sophisticated share manager might be able to reconnect the share when the sharing machine goes to a different page(?).

This probably isn't helpful for the problem cited, but I needed something to do while I downed the first three cups this morning.

John