Network Defense showing 97 Outbound connection

[Guest]

[dAlden]

Howdy All -

I've got the strangest of problems brought to light by Comodo's Network Defense and am hoping I can find a guro here who can provide some insight. Here's the poop: Whenever I start IE8, anywhere from 50 to 150 oubound connections (TCP) occur under iexplore.exe. Many are duplicates or triplicates of the very same IP Destination. They generally drop off after five minutes or so to the point where Network Defense shows only one or two active connections. Bytes in and Bytes out are very small, so I know information is not flowing in and out of my machine.  

This started last week after Comodo performed an automatic update. I'm running 3.10.102363.531

Now I know many first thoughts would be malware, virus, rootkits or all of the above, but I am almost 99.9% certain my machine is clean. I've checked, rechecked and checked again with multiple scanners and everything keeps coming back clean. Hijackthis shows nothing unusual. I think something has flipped its lid, but I don't know where to begin to find that flipped lid :-)

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I don't know where else to turn. . .

THANKS!

[John Buchanan]

IE8 runs multiple occurrences of its connections, hence the reason it won't crash if one site crashes.
Second, other connections seen may be the connections required to  pick up additional images/information displayed on the pages (not all are stored on the same site these days).

[dAlden]

Many thanks for yours, John. Perhaps I just never noticed it before, but Network Defense lights up like a Christmas Tree when I start ie8 or remain idle for a bit and then move onto to a new site. Does the same thing happen to you? At any given time, how many outbound connections do you have going?

CHEERS!dAlden

[EricJH]

It has been noticed that CIS is registering more connections than before. It has been suggested that it might be related to a bigger time window in which CIS is monitoring traffic.

[Tags:]