As you guys probably know, we had a web server demo running on FEZ Panda at maker faire. We had a little problem with the demo where the server “seem” to hang for 5 seconds. I called the GHI office to talk to the guys for a fix but they assured me that they tested it and all went perfectly!!
… we ended up with a long argument on where the hanging is coming from…we couldn’t solve it over the phone. I honestly blamed it on the beta release…I was wrong, read more!
So, we finally got a chance to try this at the office, it worked PERFECTLY! :wall: I couldn’t believe my eyes so I took the demo to my laptop (same one used at faire) and I was seeing the 5 second delay again. Good thing I saw that or I was going to go crazy 
Running wireshark for few seconds showed us exactly where the error is 
So what was the error? Well, on windows7 and only windows7, if you set a default gateway then windows will keep looking for that IP (ARP requests) in which will block the network interface for 5 seconds!!! I removed the default gateway and it started working perfectly. I went back to a windows vista machine but everything worked just fine on vista even if you had a default gateway.
It if my fault that default gateway shouldn’t be set since I do not have a gateway but at the same time, adding an IP for a non-existing gateway shouldn’t block the network interface.
Lesson learned. Hopefully you have learned something from this and you would not have similar problems in future.
