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As much as I enjoy using Vista, Ive definitely noticed that in some networking activities, it definitely seems to struggle. Particularly compared with Windows XP.
For the most part its not a problem I just assumed that Vistas beefy network stack was responsible, and made a mental note to fix it at some point. And then forgot.
But recently I encountered a really frustrating problem. Using Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) to connect from a Vista Enterprise machine to a Windows 2003 server, the performance was so woeful that I was starting to worry whether there was a problem with the server.
All this automatic tuning of the Vista network stack sounds great in theory, but the problem is that some clients dont support TCP window scaling, or do but dont have it enabled. Additionally, some firewall products also dont support it. In either scenario, the result is dropped packets which affects network performance horrendously -- your traffic is literally dropping into a black hole, never to be seen again.
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