Web Browser(s) and Forums Problems

In the last couple of weeks, I am having trouble with forums rendering in both Firefox (3.0.4 and 3.0.5), and in IE 7 (as a backup). I've even downloaded Opera and I have the same problem. What happens is, the forums take forever to load pages, the links hang up, and posting replies hang up. xtremevbtalk is one of the trouble forums. It's taken me several tries just to post this thread here, too. It's hanging on the "Submit New Thread" button (NoScript is allowing everything for the site, but remember this happens in IE, too). I've been trying 10 times to even post this thread. Sometimes the pages do not render properly - they are "deformed". I've completely uninstalled and reinstalled Firefox 3.0.5, re-adding only NoScript and AdBlock Plus. Same thing.

If I ping the servers hosting the forums, there is no apparent issue. If I do a tracert, the last hop of one server times out. I have come to understand that this doesn't mean there is necessarily a problem - some routers will always show a timeout even if fully functional.

"Standard" web sites don't seem to be having any of these issues.

I'm at a loss here. I have connectivity to the servers is there (ping, tracert), but rendering in three browsers is messed up. These forums work fine when I am at work on my work laptop. This leads me to believe it is either something on my PC, or something with my ISP. I'm at a loss here on what to check next. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

EDIT: I took a stab at closing SpyBot Resident (thingy), Avast AV, and Sunbelt Personal Firewall all at the same time, just to see if I could post this. It worked. I'll have to figure out which is the culprit, unless someone could clue me in on which one it may be. Likely Avast, since that is the only thing that was updated in the past two weeks.

 

More than likely the firewall is the problem. I have seen this happen before. Most forums have some sort of advertisement script running and it needs to open a port to the ad server. the firewall blocks this causing pa ges to half load before they timeout. Ad blockers block the content after the ad is loaded. It doesn't stop the server connections.

 

Hmmmm. The forums I'm having issues with never had issue before, and I didn't update Sunbelt PF. I didn't get any popups asking about connections, and there are no explicit "Deny" settings for either of the browsers - they are set to Allow or Ask. As I am typing this, I wonder if it will post since I rebooted since the original post, and SpyBot, Avast, and Sunbelt PF are up and running. I'll cross my fingers as I hit reply. If it still happens, I'll have to see if there is anything I can do with the firewall. It's just strange because I've been using these three applications together for months and months.

EDIT: Okay, this reply wouldn't process. I temporarily disabled the firewall, and it went right through. So it's Sunbelt. Now I have to figure out what to do in the firewall configuration.

EDIT #2: Strangely enough, the firewall isn't blocking the editing of posts all the time. Just sometimes. Would ad servers be hit during editing of posts, too? Also, good to see you're still around, Bob. This is the first place I thought of for help on this.

 

Here is a screen shot of denied incoming requests. I'm assuming those are the ports you mentioned, Bob. I never had problems connecting to and using the forums at taleworlds.com (forums.taleworlds.net). I also had to temporarily disable Sunbelt PF to submit this image to photobucket. These entries must have logged when I was trying to reply to a thread at taleworlds, because it froze and I checked the firewall log.



The question now is:

1. Why did this just start happening?

2. What can I do to fix it? I'm not very good with firewall settings.

 

They might have switched ad servers or done some other changes requiring ports to be opened to you. Looking at your log I would open up posts 1600-1699 to inbound connections.

Next time you experience the problem open a command prompt and use netstat command.

Code:

netstat /a  

Post what it shows.

 

I'll check that out.

Thanks a million, Bob. Wishing you and yours a great holiday!