Anyone having this problem?: Firewall stops pings after about 20 seconds

ESS Firewall seems to be causing ethernet to drop:

Two customers on different providers with different modems have this week both had the same symptoms: once reset the modem pings about 8 or 10 times and then fails to ping.
If I disable and re-enable the ethernet (WinXP), it pings again a few times and then fails again.

In both cases I arranged for a replacement modem.
However replacing the modem did not resolve the issue.. for the first customer.
Disabling the ESET firewall resolved the issue. So I tried changing the setting from Strict to Sharing, and this resolved the issue.
I am due back at the second customer soon, so will try this to confirm..

Both customers have had ESS for some months with no issue.
So I was wondering if this is some kind of update combination (Windows/ESET) that has caused this - and if anyone else has seen it?

(I have many other customers on XP/ESS without the issue.)
And I still completely recommend ESS and put it on wherever possible - even when the customer is pushing for AVG8 Free...

Bruce (New Zealand)

 

The issue seems to have resolved itself as the second customer's modem has now started working again with no intervention!
So it must have been an update of some kind that caused this and has been resolved.