I have a VB.NET serviced component (COM+), running on a lan, that
calls out to an external web service to place an order with a
supplier.

The problem machine is the middle tier (COM+) for our in house
applications, and also has a mail server to service a 100 stores
(don't ask me why, I don't like this either).

The call to the webservice works correctly on our test COM+ machine
but fails on the production machine with the above error.  It also
works correctly from my development machine.

I have no control over the implementation of the webservice.

From the problem machine, I can access the asmx via internet explorer
and see web methods and descriptions.

The machine.config is in its default state (no proxy specified).

The network admin has given both COM+ machines (and my developer
machine if I run it from here) the ability to bypass the proxy server,
thus there are no settings specified (or required to browse the web)
in the IE LAN settings.  I did this as I couldn't get it to work by
supplying credentials programmatically ( eg svr.PreAuthenticate =
true; and svr.Proxy.Credentials = new
System.Net.NetworkCredential("username","password","domain");).

I have run netstat -p TCP on the production COM+ machine.  On that
occassion there were probably 20 connections in the TIME_WAIT state
and probably 40 ESTABLISHED.

I am about to rebuild the serviced component to return the stack trace
rather than exception.tostring.  Hopefully that might reveal more
detail.

Any help is appreciated.

Regards,

Ross