Thanks to all the folks who replied to my questions about Windows and Apache. Bill S’s suggestion to uncomment “EnableSendfile off” yielded a 2-3x increase in the pages/second return rate. Thank you, Bill! But we’re still seeing lots of dropped connections, so I don’t think we’re out of the woods. In the meantime, I put Apache on another machine running Win2003 Server Enterprise. Everything worked fine, no dropped connections. We’re going to take a chill pill and come back to this, probably reinstalling a different OS, after Thanksgiving.