[Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>]

gpaz@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> A big question - what is Ethereal doing while capturing that somehow
> ordered or priortized the outbound packets such that the connection worked
> as perfectly as possible?  Something very important was happening while
> capture was active!  I need to duplicate this activity all time.

What Ethereal's doing while capturing packets is, well, capturing 
packets - it doesn't include any code to do the low-level packet 
capture, it just includes calls to libpcap/WinPcap to capture traffic.

What libpcap/WinPcap does depends on the OS you're running; on UN*Xes, 
it just uses OS-native mechanisms, and, on Windows, it uses the WinPcap 
driver, which uses OS-native mechanisms.

Try capturing with tcpdump/WinDump; you'll probably see the same 
effects.  If so, this might be an issue of something the packet capture 
mechanism is doing.  If it's UN*X, you'd have to ask whoever's UN*X it 
is; if it's Windows, you'd have to ask the WinPcap developers.