sudden problems with socket connections

[Scott Evans]

Hi folks,

I'm one of the maintainers of TNT, an IM client for Emacs.
(http://tnt.sourceforge.net) 

I use TNT daily on two machines, but in the last few days I am unable 
to establish a connection from my laptop.  The connection attempt never 
returns an error, but nothing seems to happen.

If I quit XEmacs, I see the expected process list:

> Proc    Status   Buffer   Tty     Command
> ----    ------   ------   ---     -------
> toc     open     (none)   (none)  network stream connection 5190 at toc.oscar.aol.com

...and the "active processes exist; kill them and exit anyway" question.


Under the hood, we connect to AIM as follows:
  (setq tocstr-process (open-network-stream "toc" nil host port))


--

I'm running 
  XEmacs 21.4 (patch 13) "Rational FORTRAN" [Lucid] (i586-pc-win32) of Sun May 25 2003 on TSUNAMI
 

...though I just downloaded and installed 21.4.19, and it exhibits the
same problem.  And TNT definitely still works fine on my desktop, which 
is on the same network as the laptop!  However, I can telnet to 
toc.oscar.aol.com 5190 from the laptop just fine.

I've rebooted; I've run -vanilla; I've done everything I can think of and 
it has no effect.  And again, this machine has been super-stable and TNT 
has been very reliable, until a couple of days ago.  Nothing has changed 
on this machine in that time.

I know this is a weird problem description, but does anyone have any
ideas what could be happening, or how I might start debugging this?

(Oddly enough, I've had to move to Emacs for other reasons but I keep a 
copy of XEmacs running only to use TNT!  Emacs never establishes a 
connection for me; the symptoms are very similar to this though the cause 
may well be completely different.)

Thanks!



--
 scott evans :: www.antisleep.com