Win XP Pro loses Internet connection at random - HELP!

I had this problem on my setup. I have a couple of XP Pro machines (which
both sufferred the same problem), plus a few other machines connected via
wireless network to a wireless hub, which in turn is connected (by wire) to
a firewall machine (Smoothwall) which in turn is connected to my cable
modem.

I found that when the "disconnection" happened I could still connect with
the hub, the firewall, and the outside world by IP address, so the problem
had to be with DNS.

I had the firewall set up to receive dynamically assigned DNS server
information from my cable provider, and the machines on the network set to
use the firewall machine as a DNS server (a setup which works flawlessly on
other versions of Windows). I have found that setting the XP machines to use
manually assigned DNS server addresses (provided by my cable provider) has
cured the problem.

So, if you are using dynamically assigned DNS servers, maybe you should try
manually setting them (contact your provider for the addresses). It might
help.

HTH.

Andrew.

"J.R. Allas" wrote in message
...
Two days ago, I performed a clean install of Win XP Pro on my system,
which operated fine under Win 98ME. XP set itself up fine and found my
cable Internet connection via a Linksys LNE100TX(v5) NIC and RCA DCM235
cable modem. I quickly began to notice that I was losing the connection
to the
Internet after random amounts of time. Programs run fine, unless they're
sending/
receiving data. If I reboot, then the connection comes back. I found
that if
I open the "Local Area Connection Status" window after I lose connection,
the number of packets sent, in the Activity area, has dropped to zero, but
the
number of packets received does not zero out. I decided to then install
ZoneAlarm 3.7.098 (free) to see if it would help, in any way. I then
found
that when this connection loss happens, the bar-graph in Zonealarm's
taskbar icon still registers data going in/out, but the Local Area
Connection
Status icon/window shows nothing happening... What could be causing this
connection loss? The connection can last for as short as a few minutes,
to
as long as 3 hrs before suddenly stopping. All hardware is still in the
same
slots it was when running under Win 98ME.
I also have a USB 2.0 / Firewire combo card in my system. I never had
any problems when running under Win 98ME, but in Win XP, both the Firewire
(IEEE-1394) card and the NIC seem to be set up for Internet access. I
tried
disabling the Firewire card in my system properties, and that didn't
change
anything... I did notice that the NIC and the PCI to USB Enhanced Host
controller
(USB 2.0 portion of combo card?) both share PCI IRQ 19. Any ideas? I'd
greatly appreciate any info or suggestions.

--

J.R. Allas - - New Lenox, IL - USA
ICQ: 65201091 - AOL IM: "R Allas Jr" - MSN Messenger: