Having Problems With Pandora Not Playing Whole Songs On Vista?

I’ve been having problems using Pandora Internet radio on Windows Vista.  Frequently a song will begin playing, then after ten to twenty seconds it will stop and skip to the next track.  I started my troubleshooting by watching the HTTP traffic using HttpFox and discovered there were several transmission errors (including NS_ERROR_FAILURE) communicating to the servers that deliver the audio files.  My next step was to look at the TCP traffic with Wireshark, and I noticed a lot of TCP retransmits and aborts.

So I did some reading and found out that Vista uses TCP window auto-scaling.  While in theory this shouldn’t cause issues, I disabled it just to see using the netsh command:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

Sure enough, Pandora began behaving correctly.  Now, I’m far from a networking guru, so if you have any information as to why this helps I’d be thrilled to know.  For now I’m just happy that I’m hearing the whole song again.

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