loopback and stuck connections

[rsfeller]

I'm post a request from our software vendor for our business. We noted some heavy process usage on our Windows 20003 Server (client) on a Windows 2003 Server. Upon investigation we determined it had to do with specialty server side software. Their experts noted that 100+ "phantom" connections to our Fire Bird Database were not releasing. His software told him that these were references on the local host (127.0.0.1) and he just found out we are using a virtual environment. So before he updates us to the latest stable version of Fire Bird he though he would try different references to the local host as he has seen issues in other virtual environment in their early days of bridging and network config.

He is going to try to make connections via the unique IP and not loopback to see if this helps old connections release as expected but he asked me if I knew of any concerns with virtual localhost adapters not releasing connections, so here I am doing some searching (with little luck) so I decided to post this odd question/comment.

This is almost over my head so I cannot answer more technical questions but I am able to follow the developers ideas and comments. He has worked with Parallels and VMware but has never heard of Sun Virtual Box (from Australia)! He said he will start to research this product too.