No, I meant some other routers were crappy on the net, not yours Anyway, what happens is that the router with the big loss gets a ping (=trace) packet. Now, it sees that the ping packet is meant to itself. It figures "WTF? I ain't no host! Stupid annoying kids... this could even be some freaky D®DOS. Psh!" and just drops it. (It actually seems to reply to the packet but only once (that's why its not 100% loss), it ignores any repeated packets) But when it sees that the packet is not meant for itself, it lets it through, which is why hops after the annoying routers are fine.