3 second lag when making http request to localhost

[Guest]

I'm using Windows Vista Business on a brand new Lenovo x61s laptop with 2G
RAM and a 1.6Ghz Intel Core Duo CPU.

I'm running a web server on the laptop and am finding a strange lag of about
3 or 4 seconds when I try to access local content (i.e. short text or html
files on my C drive served by my local web server). In contrast, access to
remote websites is lightning fast with this machine and connection, and
applications seem to be performing well on the machine overall. Local http
requests are the only problem so far.

I've tried a couple of web servers (including Apache) and have seen the
problem in all of them. I've tried accessing the content in both IE and
Firefox. I've tried URLs of all the following forms:
http://localhost/mylocalfile.txt, http://127.0.0.1/mylocalfile.txt,
http://<my-pc-name>/mylocalfile.txt.

The best advice I found in a couple of hours of web searching was 1) set the
network.dns.disableIPv6 config property to true in Firefox [didn't help, and
as mentioned, the problem surfaces in IE as well], and 2) turn off TCP
autotuning with "netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=disabled" [didn't
help].

Is there anything I'm overlooking that would explain why access to a _local_
site would be slow when the machine performs well overall and remote sites
are loading quickly?

 

[Guest]

It appears that Zonealarm was causing the problem even though 1) I had
properly configured program permissions for the web servers and browsers, and
2) I had tested with Zonealarm shutdown. If you see similar behavior you may
want to try a complete uninstall. I had used Zonealarm happily on an XP
machine for years and had never encountered this issue.