Preface: Please - no snarky comments about getting a better connection. Living with this garbage dialup for what must be fifteen years I'm well aware how bad I need broadband. 3g is capped at a sad 3gb/mo with rather spotty coverage and satellite is expensive for a 250mb/day cap when its not rained or snowed out. No line of sight for anything else. That leaves dialup which I manage to pull down ~12gb/mo on... I'm stuck here with no viable alternatives for the foreseeable future.

Moving on to the problem at hand:

I am encountering frequent data corruption on every machine on my network other than the host with ICS enabled on my dialup connection. Websites are garbled characters, streaks and blocks are all over images, encrypted connections throw SSL errors out constantly and downloads fail their checksums. The internet is basically unusable on any of the machines on my network sharing the connection (an older windows xp box and my macbook pro). Everything works fine on the host machine though.

Just to be clear the data corruption is only when using the internet with ICS. All other network activity such as large file transfers between computers on the network manage to complete without issue and do not fail their checksums. Without ICS the internet is just fine - no problems outside of the usual dialup factor.

I've tried ICS with clean installs of both Windows 7 and Vista SP2 - both suffer the same problem. I've tested this with a 3g modem to rule out dialup/my modem (US Robotics 5610B) being the issue and it has the exact same problem with ICS. If I boot Windows XP Pro SP3 on the host machine and use it for ICS there is no data corruption and everything works fine on the networked machines.

The only thing I could find searching was this thread with a few others encountering the same issue and no solution: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/235878-4...data-corruption

No third party firewalls or anti-virus software. Tried it with and without the Windows Firewall and Microsoft Security Essentials - no different. Also tried using the default ip addresses/subnet that enabling ICS assigns instead of 10.x.x.x - no difference unfortunately.

ipconfig /all on windows 7: http://janpingel.com/misc/files/ipconfig-w7.txt

network map: http://janpingel.com/misc/files/network.png

There may still be routers around that can do dialup.

Lots of ideas and some model numbers here.

http://www.google.com.au/#hl=en&num=20...f4dae79243053b3

I have considered setting up a router for dialup as I don't want another box on 24/7 between the noise and power usage. I looked at few routers capable of OpenWRT with usb (to share a printer and UPS) but the cost was prohibitive after the router + serial modem + serial to usb adapter. What few serial modems are still around are very expensive (particularly the courier - yikes). I've tried several usb modems in vain to try and find one that works with OS X and is as reliable as my USR hardware modem but they all seemed to be awful. 14.4k awful and dropping out very regularly. It also looked like I'd probably have to roll my own OpenWRT with some specific kernel modules and drivers so I ended up going back to XP when Vista was released and I first hit this problem.

I agree with Ankle. Is is a real pain.

Actually it runs well for some days, after that - it starts malfunctioning.

Even sometimes it takes minutes just for the Adapters to be ready to set up a connection, otherwise even Hangs.

I was the server & admin for the VPN of our hostel network - I faced it pretty badly.

I do OS reinstalls frequently (once in a month at the VERY least) & had Vista & Linux as BackUp - so not affected by it too much, but I can guess the problem for regular users.

ONE MORE THING : I'm Just curious, if anyone else feels that merging networks was better in Vista!