I am experiencing a problem with my TCP/IP network stack under Windows
2000 SP4, which over the past few months has recently become fubar'd.
Without ceremony or event log, I suddenly cannot open connections to
any host, and all existing connections are dropped. Strangely, other
machines can still ping me.

My solution is to disable the network interface, and then restart it.
However when I'm not at home - like right now - I can't restart it,
which effectively means I can't access my machine.

I'd like to monitor the machine's ability to connect to external
networks, and if it can't see anything for more than a minute, drop
the connection and restart it automagically.

I don't mind a hack, as long as it's non-invasive. I'm a VB6
developer, so if there is a command line that can be called (a net
command perhaps?) then I'll write a vbscript. If there's a library
accessible from Visual Basic, then give me the details and I'll write
a service.

Feel free to ask for clarification. TIA.

Strange problem, I'd probably try further to find out what was
happening rather than trying to fix the current situation. However,
what about scheduling ipconfig /renew to run every x minutes?