Programs using the IPX/SPX-compatible protocol (NWLINK) to communicate over a wide area network (WAN) or other slow link may not connect or may experience dropped connections. Analysis of network traffic may reveal that an SPX Watchdog timer has expired on the remote node. This symptom can occur particularly if the watchdog parameters on the server are configured to non-default values.

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SPX Watchdog timers are not configurable for the IPX/SPX-compatible protocol in Windows 95 and Windows 95 OEM Service Release 2 (OSR2).

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You may be able to work around this issue by reconfiguring the SPX watchdog timer parameters on the server to their default values.

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This problem no longer occurs in Windows 98. To resolve this problem, install the current version of Windows. For information about the current version of Windows, visit http://www.microsoft.com/windows (http://www.microsoft.com/windows).

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According to Novell documentation (TID #2910905), the following timers are among the Watchdog timers that are configurable for Novell's IPX/SPX protocol:

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SPX Verify Timeout

This parameter controls how long the watchdog waits after it has sent a packet before it sends a system packet to keep the connection alive.

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SPX Listen Timeout

This parameter controls how long the watchdog waits after it has received a packet before it sends a system packet requesting an acknowledgement so it will know the connection still exists.

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Send Timeout

This parameter controls how long IPX waits for an acknowledgement of a sent packet.

For additional information about Novell's implementation of SPX timers, please consult Novell or your Novell NetWare documentation.

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