AutoIt TCP and F-Secure (half-solved)

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I have a series of AutoIt executables that chat via TCP using the AutoIt IP bindings. There is very good help, examples, and forum support for all this, and it works great for me.

That is, except for one particular workstation and its server partner, which would experience occasional random disconnects in a few minutes up to an hour or more. One side would report 10054 (WSAECONNRESET, i.e. the other side reset the connection), but the other side would still be running as usual and obviously not disconnected.

I messed around for a long time with this, until I finally noticed that this particular workstation was the only one running F-Secure client. This thing asks for permission for an exe to run, and for an exe to access the network, so it should have been obvious, but I did not believe that a firewall that is so ubiquitous could be partly to blame for very strange random disconnects like I was observing.

But finally, after disabling F-Secure, all these problems went away. It may become necessary to re-enable F-Secure and figure out all of its configuration settings to allow my applications to run correctly, but this is a fight for another day. At least now I know what was causing really, frustratingly difficult random problems, and I wanted to pass that along.