Sent packets jumping up by huge numbers

[The Saint]

I'm running Windows XP and every so often, seemingly randomly, the number of sent packets will suddenly jump up by a huge number, like over 4 billion. I don't see any trends in this, it seems like it can happen at any time, even not long after a fresh reboot.

I've run ad-aware and Norton's Antivirus and they both come up clean. I don't actually think the computer can be sending those packets, since the number jumps by so much. I've never actually caught it jumping up, but I have been close before. One time I opened up my network properties not long after a reboot, looked at it and everything looked normal at like 8k packets sent. 5 minutes later I opened it up and it was at 4 billion 3 hundred million. I've never actually seen it increasing at a high rate either, whenever I catch it with a huge number, it's always increasing at a normal rate.

What do you guys make of this? Is this something I should be worried about?

Thanks in advance!

 

[GprophetB]

Crazy, i had the same problem at work with an employees laptop.

we checked the switch it was on and it was showing zero activity (like it should) on that port.

so basically we couldnt figure out why it was "tricking" itselft into thinking it was sending billions upon billions of packets. It didnt affect ANYTHING across the network along with her laptop.

So basically we left it alone and ignored it (because the switch was showing the correct info)

hope that helps-

 

[Abzstrak]

I've seen this before with a bad tcpip stack, and also once with bad NIC drivers... I'd try replacing both and see if it fixes it.