Plantronics CT12 with XP SP3 Blocks IP Traffic?

[salq]

I just had another tedious but polite few discussions with MJ tech support. I did a 45 minute conference call this morning. The next call I tried to make was badly broken up.

I re-started MJ as I've been pavlov-trained to do, and instead of getting a clear call, I got no dial tone. The PC I was using couldn't access the internet, so of course it wouldn't work. I hung up the phone and checked the usual suspects, they looked good, I disabled / enabled networking (wired) and internet access was back. But the call still failed.

During tech support (where they asked me to make sure my underwear wasn't backwards, as that sometimes causes problems), I noticed that the internet was blocked on the PC when I tried to make a call, and worked again when I hit End. I started a ping loop to my router, and most of the time, when I tried to make a call, the pings timed out, and hitting End brought them back. I tried just hitting Talk without dialing out, and had the same results. Occasionally it worked, which seemed to have nothing to do with restarting MJ or plugging it back in or running upgrade.exe for the 3rd time in 10 minutes ("please just do it anyway" - classic). Finally I tried another phone, and it worked consistently (at least as well as MJ usually works).

The phone that failed could have just been out of juice, it's at least 3 years old and I did do that 45 minute call. But I'm posting here because I don't quite see the connection between a phone that's not quite charged and blocking all IP traffic. I haven't run a network sniffer yet to see if anything interesting happens, but I've at least watched the network status to see that the line isn't getting choked by a bunch of transmissions. The tech suggested I check with the ISP, despite me telling him, her, and him multiple times that I'm pinging my internal router. Maybe I'll be more amused a few days from now. I'll mention this more briefly in the incompatible phone thread. This thread is because I haven't seen the symptom mentoned elsewhere. I've seen this PC lose internet access on rare occasions, and this is the first time I've considered that it might be the magicJack.

[GuyOnTheAir]

You would likely get much more help with your problem with WINDOWS XP if you didn't post in a MAC section of the forums.