I have a puzzling issue regarding accessing research.microsoft.com from my home Qwest DSL connection. By default, I frequently get timeouts when accessing research.microsoft.com from Firefox, Safari, or Chrome on my Mac. I also cannot access the site from Internet Explorer in a Windows VM. However, I am able to access the site through proxify.com, so I know the site is not down. Furthermore, I haven't noticed problems accessing other sites (in particular, www.microsoft.com works fine). Also, I can access research.microsoft.com when I'm connected to networks other than my home Qwest DSL connection. Together, the above make me suspect a problem with either my router (Airport Express) or, more likely, my ISP.

Anyone have any thoughts on how I can narrow down the problem further? I could call my ISP and tell them the above, but my feeling is that probably won't get me very far. I can get by browsing research.microsoft.com through a proxy, but it would be nice to figure out what's going on here and fix the problem. Oh, the only relevant discussion I found via Google was here:

http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies-archive.cfm/1311734.html

Update: Thanks to those who have tried to help! I found one other thing while Googling that may be vaguely relevant:

http://thedaneshproject.com/posts/supportmicrosoftcom-not-working-behind-squid/

Disabling the Accept-Encoding headers in Firefox actually didn't make a difference for me. I just thought the above might spark some other ideas about how mishandling of HTTP headers somewhere might be causing this problem. Thanks again!

Another update: In case anyone is still thinking about this; I've found that I can't surf research.microsoft.com using the links text-based browser, but I can reliably download individual files with wget. Maybe that helps?