DNS lookup causes 20s timeout on some systems

[Randy]

This problem was observed on a VM running Vista SP1 Enterprise with no domain controller.

Users of the .NET SDK may experience a 20s delay when establishing a connection for the first time. This appears to occur because of a 20s socket timeout within the WCF infrastructure. It is possible to eliminate this delay by adding the computer name the HOSTS file on the system.

The HOSTS file can be found in C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\Etc.

Add one or two lines (::1 is only used if IPv6 is installed on the machine):

127.0.0.1 computername
::1 computername

This problem is likely related to the network security settings on a Vista machine (e.g. is network discovery turned off) since the majority of machines do not have this problem.