Can't stay connected

[scottws]

First, the basics:

Windows XP Professional
AMD Athlon XP 2400+
EPoX 8K5A2+
768MB Corsair XMS PC2700
Visiontek GeForce 3
Creative Sound Blaster Audigy Gamer
2 Maxtor ATA133, 7200RPM, 40GB hdds in RAID0
Netgear GA302T gigabit ethernet card

Ok, this system, with the exception of the ethernet card has been up and running just fine for about a year now. Three weeks ago, I moved and switched Internet providers from Cincinnati Bell Zoomtown to Time Warner Roadrunner. At my new location, we have a 6 PC LAN running off a Linksys WRT54G router and Linksys EG005W switch. Until early last week we had regular ethernet coming off the router and a series of Netgear hubs and switches. Back then, I had an Intel NIC. The connection was fine, but for some reason no one's "lease" would ever renew. So every day, when the lease expired, we'd have to manually obtain a new lease by repairing the connection via the Network Connections menu or rebooting. Eventually we reset the router to issue leases for a period of five days.

Fast forward to today. I can only stay connected to the network for a short period of time. I've been on as little as five minutes and as long as about one hour since yesterday. Repairing the connection doesn't work. I can't even connect to the router via my Internet browser. It's definately an issue with my machine and my machine alone. No one else has this problem (though, as stated, everyone has problems when their assigned lease expires).

I suspect it has something to do with Universal Plug and Play, but I cannot be sure. See, I was using eMule for the first time yesterday. I saw a guide in there on how to enable UPnP to get the router to forward ports for you instead of doing it via the router itself, since I personally was taking up 7 of 10 port forward slots in the router software. Long story short, I got UPnP set up and forwarded my ports via the Internet Connection thing in Network Connections. But it didn't work. I still had to forward the ports via the router itself (yes, UPnP service was enabled on the router).

Well today I've been having major problems staying connected for longer than 20 minutes. I can't say what causes my network to go out. It seems to be completely random and nothing is reported to Windows' Event Log. I tried stopping and disabling the SSDP Device Host and UPnP services. After I did that, my connection still failed after a short time. I tried reinstalling the drivers for my new Netgear card.

What course of action do you recommend? Why does my network fail?

I'm thinking of possibly trying to uninstall the Internet Gateway Discovery and Control Service and Universal Plug and Play (both of which I installed yesterday as per the guide in eMule help). If that doesn't work my last course of action, unless something else is recommended, is a complete reformat.

Edit: Oh, I forgot to clarify that before I followed that eMule guide, I was able to stay connected just fine until my lease expired. Only after following the guide and setting up UPnP have I been having this very short duration connectivity.

Edit: The connection died on me again right after posting that last edit. Which reminds me, to get the connection back I must reboot. That is the only thing that fixes it and it also leads me to believe it is not a problem with the new Netgear card.

 

[lobadobadingdong]

have you tried uninstalling the drivers for the nic and starting the configuration from scratch with a fresh ip stack and nic drivers?

 

[scottws]

No. In fact that sucks. I completely forgot to uninstall the drivers for my old card. But I unistalled Internet Gateway Discovery and Control Service and UPnP and I've been up since before I made that last edit.

 

[scottws]

Yeah, uninstalling those two programs was the solution. I haven't been disconnected yet since doing so and it's been a several hours now.

 

[scottws]

Ok, that wasn't the solution. Now my connection is real flaky. Even the connection to my router seems slow. And I did get disconnected about an hour ago.

How do I go about uninstalling my old drivers now that I've removed the card and how do I get a new IP stack?

 

[lobadobadingdong]

in the device manager, is where you remove the drivers, if there are no networking devices the tcp/ip protocol will automatically be uninstalled. after you remove the drivers, restart the pc and let it detect the nic again, it will install the nic drivers, tcp/ip, and everything else you need to defaults. then go from there.

 

[scottws]

Ok, the problem is no longer limited to my PC.

I renewed the TCP/IP stack using the following command-line:

"netsh int ip reset ipreset.log"

This changed nothing.

Now the rest of the PCs don't work either. The wierd thing is, that only the web is the thing having trouble. eMule, America's Army, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, Counter-Strike, BitTorrent... they all work fine. Sometimes a web page will come up, sometimes it won't. Sometimes we can't even get into the router via IE or Firebird. So it seems it is actually the router that's giving us trouble. It's almost like it's blocking port 80 or something. But sometimes it does block all traffic.

Again, the router is a Linksys WRT54G, v1.0 I think, upgraded to 1.30.7 firmware. A special note is that we've only been having troubles after the firmware update. I tried to hunt down some older firmware, like the same version that was on there before the upgrade: 1.02.1, but it was frustrating with the Internet sporadically working.

Any new tips?

 

[scottws]

Ok, I'm really at a loss here. My roommate switched routers from the Linksys to a Netgear one. However, I'm still having the same trouble. One moment I can't get on a web page and then just a moment later I hit refresh and the page pops up. So I guess it could be how the router is configured. However, I looked at a Linksys Knowledge Base item that was a guide on how to set up Roadrunner with their router. I called my roommate and went through the guide with him and he said he had already done all those things.

Man I'm at an incredible loss here. I cannot tell you how frustrating it is dealing with the Internet now. Oh, and America's Army doesn't work anymore. I can connect, refresh the server list and even join, but after just a few minutes of playing I notice that I can't do a lot of things like change weapons, talk, anything. I can run around and shoot, but it's pointless, since everyone else is stuck in place - I'm disconnected basically.

 

[lobadobadingdong]

you might try a differnet nic, it's possible your is creating a broadcast storm gumming up the works.

 

[scottws]

Ok, I'll have to do that tomorrow. So are you saying the NIC could be bad or the type of card just isn't good for our network?

 

[lobadobadingdong]

it could be bad, it should work in a 100mbit port without a problem, dunno if that's 10/100/1000 or not, most gigabit nics are but a few are only 100/1000

 

[scottws]

Okay, well, I did what you said. But actually, even as I had my computer turned of and unplugged, the network problems with the other PCs persisted. I had to leave, but my roommate was messing with the router all night aparently. I came home just now any my other roommate says everything is fixed.

I actually have two NICs in there now. My gigabit Netgear one (yes it is 10/100/1000) and my old Intel 10/100.