Faster way to emulate Tracert

I've been working on a program with the intent of determining the router table of my ISPs closest router to me. The best method I could think of was to Tracert every number known to man, but even shelling 30 instances of it and limiting it to 5 hops it still looks like it is going to take several years.

While looking through the VB forums, I noticed that many people had considered/worked on similar problems and it was pointed out that pingpath is a TCP/IP alternative to the ICMP of Tracert. The beginning of pingpath returns addresses quite quickly, and then it sits for 4-400 seconds evaluating the quality of the path. I was wondering if there was a way to emulate only the beginning of pingpath, and skip over the evaluation time?

Alternately, if anyone knows a way to make a router spit its routing table to you, that would be even better.

Thanks in advance.

What programming language is it in?

Oh, very sorry, I forgot that I'd moved over to the networking forum. I wrote the program in Visual Basic 6.

Tracert uses pings, doesn't it? It just increments the ttl each time. With a ttl of 1 you get the first address.

considering you cannot speed how fast the network respond to icmp echo's there isn't much you can do.

the fast way would to sniff the network and determine what routing protocol is being used. If there is no authentication, just enable whatever routing protocol on your router and you will be able to see isp routing table after it updates.

then again, it is a good way for the isp to turn off your service.

now that I think about if you can sniff your network, you can probably finger out the closet router from the return packet header if it is tcp/ip.