Terrible problems with wingate 5.x.x and XP Pro

[tmrann]

Hello all
I am having terrible trouble with Wingate running on Windows XP Pro. I have been trying to resolve this problem for quite some time now. I'm currently trying to use Wingate 5.0.7.
- Windows XP will stay connected to the internet for Weeks through a dialup without Wingate running. When I start Wingate the PC will reboot any time from 1 minute to 8 hours.
- I have removed and reinstalled Wingate MANY times.
- I have reloaded Windows several times.
- I have checked for updated Motherboad BIOS & drivers, Video Drivers, Modem drivers, Windows patches etc...
- I have tried various versions of Wingate 5.
- I have tried to load Wingate without ENS.
- I have tried disabling DHCP & DNS.
- I have tried the BETA ENS driver

The BETA ENS driver seems to be more stable but it eventually reports errors or Wingate becomes unusable - it just hangs with a yellow screen in the system tray icon.

I am using a dialup with a static IP, the internal NIC is configured as 192.168.0.5/255.255.255.0 with no other DNS, Gateway or WINS settings. DHCP is disabled because there is already a DHCP server on the LAN.

Please Help

Regards
Trevor

[adrien]

what sort of network card are you using?

We have found a few issues recently with some common cards, those that use hardware checksums will need the hardware checksums turned off if you are using VPN or Transparent redirection (these are the only two functions in WinGate that modify outbound packets from the local stack).

Also if you are running an Intel Pro/100+ Management adapter, and it is using a montoring agent (Promon.exe) then you need to make sure that does not run.

We have some new beta drivers too if you would like to try, I can send you one for XP. It is quite a bit more stable than the old ENS beta driver even.

[tmrann]

Hi Adrien
I'm using a realtek RTL8139 - on board Fast NIC, it's a Gigabyte Motherboard. Using the Microsoft drivers at the moment.

Please send me the new beta, I'll give it a try

Thanks
Trevor

[adrien]

OK, just sent the zip file.

Adrien

[tmrann]

Hi Adrien

I have just tried to apply the patches you sent and the problem is now much worse. XP wont fully load anymore, it starts to load, then flashes a blue screen of death and reboots. The blue screen doesn't stay on long enough to read the error. If I try to start in safe mode, it gets as far as loading qbikhxp.sys file then reboots. I can no longer get my XP machine online.

Any other thoughts?

Thanks
Trevor

[tmrann]

Any thoughts ... anyone? Am I a shot duck?

[adrien]

Hi, sorry, missed that - the release of 5.0.10 went out after those files I sent you, which had a couple of fixes in them... we also have a couple more mods we have made to solve a couple of issues...

could we send you another driver to try? Or you could try downloading 5.0.10

Adrien

[tmrann]

Hi again

Thanks for your reply. I downloaded & installed 5.0.10, It ran for about 3 hours then rebooted.

<sigh>

Regards
Trevor

[adrien]

Have you done a virus check on your network recently?

We recently found problems like this when msblaster virus was running.

I do have another driver I could send also if that might help, which fixed a problem that msblaster showed up - running out of free port numbers for NAT.

Adrien

[tmrann]

Hi Adrien
I re-checked for viruses and there are none. You may as well send me the driver & I'll give it a go.

One thing I have noticed it that there is always a massive amount of activity in the "Activity" window. This activity is constant and there are always hundreds of entries.

An example is NAT: ICMP 139.130.196.58 <-> 203.41.253.158 repeated hundreds of times. Is this normal ?

The problem really seems like a memory or resource leak of some kind.

Regards
Trevor

[tmrann]

Another error which comes up in System Messages:

0705 ENS

Undefined ENS memory problem - possible cause: memory exhaustion.
Statistics: Kernel mem: 0, Frag mem: 0

If I check task manager, there is plenty of free memory and the CPU usage is fine.

The system idle Process is the highest CPU user running at about 65%

Trevor

[adrien]

aha!

Sounds like something has put your NIC into promiscuous mode - you aren't running MAC bridging are you?

Adrien