My son is having an issue on his Windows XP PC. The problem is only in multiplayer. When he plays single player there are no problems at all. In multiplayer he can connect to a server and everything is ok for 5-10 minutes. Then he starts to notice that when he's mining things begin to not drop resources and soon after he gets this message:

"Internal exception: java.net.SocketException: Connection reset by peer: socket write error"

When this happens it hangs his NIC and the only way to clear it is to unplug his Ethernet cable and plug it back in or to reboot. He has no other issues with any other games.

I've tried uninstalling and re-installing Java on his machine but that didn't seem to help. It's as if Minecraft/Java is having some issue with his NIC, crashing and Windows/NIC can't seem to recover.

This seems to be a fairly common issue judging by the number of messages I'm seeing in the various Minscraft forums. Wondering if anyone has seen this or heard of any possible resolutions.

Thanks!