Dropped packets

Is there a way to set up a computer to retransmit all packets that aren't acknowledged withing a second or 2?  No matter what I do I can't seem to stop my router from dropping packets (checked all firewall settings, tried lowering the MTU, etc).  It interrupts streaming content, rapidshare downloads, and frequently it will fail to load a webpage (when it fails, if I stop and then refresh once or twice it usually works).  Is there a way to set up http packets, for instance, to auto-retransmit a preset number of times if no reply is received from the destination?  I know there's something like this built into TCP, but for whatever reason it isn't applicable or isn't working.  I'm on windows xp and don't want to set up a routing computer to handle network traffic or anything like that.

Thanks in advance

Need moar TTL

Would that really help?  I think my router is dropping the packets, I don't think they are being lost in the internet.  How would changing TTL settings solve the problem?

Need haxed TCP stack

There are some parameters you can tweak in XP related to the initial timeout and frequency of acks, but once the data starts coming in, it's always standard exponential falloff.

tl&dr: I had a droppy connection a while ago and it was basically unfixable, expect with outside help tunneling everything using an UDP proxy with very aggresive retransmit.

Try setting the MTU to 1452 on everything