intermittant "connection reset" problem browsing web sites at home

while browsing the web, once every 15-20 mins or so I won't be able to connect to any web sites for about 60 seconds. I get the Firefox error "The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading", and I will need to click "try again" or refresh several times before any pages will load again.

The interesting part- while this is happening, I can still ping yahoo.com, google.com just fine, and games that are already connected to the internet aren't interrupted.

I'm running windows 7, connecting to my wireless router using a WG111v3 USB card, and using WPA2 with a strong passphrase.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance!!

Open the advanced WLAN adapter properties, set the Power Saving mode to OFF/CAM (constantly awake mode) and see if the problem persists.

Edit: test the connection with an unencrypted network or change the channel of the router (maybe another appliance or wireless network nearby is causing an interference).

The connection to the server was reset

I'm fairly certain this is indicating that the remote server closed the connection with an RST, this is very different from something timing out.

Are you on an ISP that does traffic shaping? Do you have one of those horrible anti-virus/firewall apps?

maybe try running some of the tests at http://www.measurementlab.net/measurement-lab-tools

The best thing you can do is install wireshark and get a packet capture of this in action.

If some device on the internet is sending you RST packets, then that rules out almost anything you can fix on your machine.