The problem seems to be with the drivers of the network card (or file corruption after virus infection or outdated driver due to OS updates).
Using a traffic analyzer, it can be observed that the 3rd packet of the TCP session is not received every time, causing the session to terminate. "TCP segment lost missing 3-way handshake"
Installing the complete driver package for the network card from the manufacturer can resolve this issue; a Windows update driver package was not sufficient in this case. (ticket 99535, 94884, 99327)