I have Centos 6.3 installed as a guest OS on a windows 8 machine using Virtualbox 4.2.8. I've configured my virtual eth0 adapter to use a static IP. sshd is on, listening to port 22 and runs at startup, and iptables is allowing port 22 traffic.

The problem is that I'm only randomly able to ssh to my guest os using putty, and at other times it'll block the connection with any of the three warnings:

"Network Error: Software caused connection abort
Network Error: Connection Refused
Network Error: Connection Reset by Peer"

I commonly get the first one, but the 2nd and 3rd seem to randomly occur. I have putty set to send empty packets every 5 seconds to keep the signal alive, but when I am able to connect, it'll still close the connection and usally give me the first warning listed...

I'm completely stumped. I've checked the secure, and network logs, but unfortunately I have no idea what they mean.. I haven't tried connecting with another client yet, but will do that next. I'll try disabling selinux as well, but I'm pretty certain that it's not a firewall issue. Any other guesses on what else to try?

This has the familiar ring of 2 hosts with the same IP address. If you have a ping tool that will show the MAC address of the answering host, they may confirm or deny if this problem is happening. Do you have other computers on your LAN? If so, disconnect from the LAN, and using only IP addresses, see if you have the same issue. Or try a different IP address.