Just within the past day or two I’ve started having some odd behavior I can’t seem to fix. On this vista install some of my DNS requests have started to run slow. I first noticed it in Firefox when I would get the "Looking up www…" message for an extended period of time in the status bar. Usually takes at least 10 seconds to resolve where ever it is I’m trying to get to. IE also is taking more time than usual just like Firefox.

I tried to ping my destination (lets just use google as the example) and the following happened. If I do a ‘ping google.com’, the name is resolved and I immediately get replies. If I do a ‘ping www.google.com’, its sits for almost 10 seconds then comes back with the resolved ip address and replies. Any address I try and ping follows suite… if I prefix ‘www’ it hangs for the 10 seconds and then works. Without the ‘www’ it works immediately. In my browser, I get similar behavior. If I go to an address with ‘www’ prefixed, it does "Looking up…" for a period of time. Without the ‘www’, it immediately go to the page.

The only thing I can find that may be causing or related to this is the firewall. If I turn off vista’s firewall everything works fine. When the firewall is on I get the problem. I’ve been unsuccessful in finding what the firewall may be blocking.

Within the past few days the only thing I’ve done out of the ordinary is setup a vpn connection to some destination. I used it and deleted it when I was done. Other than that, nothing of mention really’s been changed lately.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!