There are times when I connect cameras, routers or other devices on my local lan that I don't always remember what their IP address is.  So I resort to using programs like "Advanced IP Scanner" to do a scan and show what IP's appear to be in use.  I've also written a dos batch file that performs 1 ping on each of the 254 IP addresses and pipes the result to a text file.  In both cases, if I have some audio streaming from the internet being played by VLC, or I have a web-cam window open (low-bandwidth, 1 frame per second) while I'm doing these scans, that the audio streaming or the webcam feed will drop out.

Is there some max_number_of_connections thing that I'm hitting on win-98?  Is there some registry entries that I can mess with?

 

I think you might be hitting yourself with a DOS attack. Try reducing the number of addresses you ping in each batch. What is the minimum number of pings that breaks the streaming connection? You can also try adding a pause between pings in the batch file.

For Advanced IP Scanner, try reducing its execution priority and also see if it can be configured to run in a background mode with lower priority and/or slower ping rate.

Yes, there are network registry settings to try. Google can point the way.