I'm on XP, Embarq (sprint's old broadband network), through a netgear wireless router, and service-provided DSL modem. It seems to happen randomly, but my net connection will cut out. I can't ping out, FF can't find server requests, and MSN won't sign on. Netstat looks fine, from what I can tell I didn't loose a dynamic address because I can pull the cable, reconnect, it reacquires an address and I still have the problem. The only solution I have in the short-term is a reboot. This will fix the problem, but it's a little less than idea. I have a gentoo machine on that router as well and it hasn't experienced any difficulties connecting. Any ideas?
What firewall are you running? I found ZoneAlarm causing that on two different installs: the connection slowed until it just stopped - as soon as I killed it the network worked fine.
I get this same problem using a netgear wired router. It usually happens after I've been on counter strike. I try to open fire fox and nothing happens eventually it just times out, but theres still a connection there because I can run EvE online. I've tried to find some sort of timeout option for the router but I cant find anything. One day it just stopped doing it, but then I formatted and it was back to square one
Well... It happened again and so I poked around the device manager to see if anything was amiss. I did notice that windows was able to shut down the device to conserve power, and I generally only experience these dropouts after periods away from the computer, so I unchecked that and I'll see how that goes. I am running ZA, if it happens again I'll try shutting it down, and then trying to repair it... If I remember, because I don't have a second machine to get online with to figure out what was suggested. Thanks