>
>That timeout is a property of the control. Surely you would have to wait for a time before you decide that nobody's going to get a reply from your ping or FTP request.

I think that the timeout property of all the controls I've looked at, were designed to take care of slow bandwidth while performing a real task. I think that if I cut the timeout of the control, then sometimes it will fail due to a slow connection rather than from an invalid IP address.

If you get a DOS prompt and type:
PING -n 1 111.222.333.444

you instantly get a response that the IP address is not reachable. The speed of PING seems to have little or nothing to do with bandwidth or timeout settings.

It's sad to even consider that running something at a DOS prompt is the fastest and most reliable way to test a connection for an Internet based application.

David,