[pacoverde]

I've got a PC I support here at work that has a real stumper of a problem: as of the last week, it cannot send a large MS-Word attachment, via either Mozilla Thunderbird 2.x or Gmail. The attachment upload gets up to about 41% (some days), 83% on others, hangs for several minutes, and eventually fails in Thunderbird with an "SMTP server failed" message or in Gmail with an "Unexpected error" message.

I have successfully sent text file attachments (large and small), but no Word attachments regardless of size.

Attempts to upload files using a free FTP service have generally failed with Word files but not with text files, et. al.

The PC is a Lenovo X61 laptop on a docking station running Windows XP with SP2. It is also running Symantec Norton Anti-virus Corporate Edition with 31 October definitions.

I've tried removing and reinstalling the NIC drivers, disabling the Windows firewall, tested another PC on the same Ethernet drop and switching the Ethernet drop to another port on the switch, to no effect. This is the only PC in an office of 12 exhibiting these symptoms.

I don't know what other steps to take to isolate the problem. Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Glenn Gillis
Information Technology Manager
Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide
U.S. Office
http://www.elaw.org