I'd like to leave the house to do my errands, but I keep getting caught up on stuff. For instance, I've been having trouble downloading course material from my CBT courseware provider (Smartforce in Ireland). It was symptomatic of the download and surfing problems I've had of late. Well, it turns out that the Smartforce techies were easily able to solve the download problem. They had me run a utility that their installation program loaded onto my PC. This utility tells me what the course-installation procedure is expecting to find when it checks key installation parameters. The culprit appears to be an out-of-date proxy statement that referred to a proxy used by the now-defunct Excite@Home network.

When I checked the current value of the proxy in my Internet Options, it was set to blank (no proxy). This is what I had been told to enter after Excite went belly up. Well, it turns out there is an undocumented proxy set up by Cogeco cable. This proxy was exposed by the winipcfg routine. When I entered the proxy value into the internet options area, guess what.... not only did the Smartforce module download start to work, but all the speed issues I've been having for the past couple of weeks disappeared instantly. I may not have to trade my modem in after all!