Question : Intermittent Network Problem on Dell D630 - Has an IP and can ping out but can't accept ping or get internet

We have a Dell D630 in our polish office running Windows XP SP2 with Office 2003.  For network connection this runs Intel 3945 ABG wirless LAN and Broadcom 57xx Gigabit controller for the LAN.

The user intermittently faces a network problem where they can't get on to the internet.  This has happened yesterday and today - the problem doesn't appear to go away until after a reboot.

When this happens the user can open cmd and check their IP - they still have an IP and can ping the DC on that network so that appears fine.  However, I can not ping them.  They have tried to run 'ipconfig /release' when this happens but nothing happens - IP is not released, the cursor just hops to the next line and sits there flashing.  The last time they had this issue I asked them to restart the machine - the machine hung on shutting down with a message saying the computer is trying to close network connections, and we had to do and press and hold to shut it down.  Once it had restarted the network came back up OK.

When the problem is not occuring I can ping them OK from any machine - it's not a windows firewall problem as this is turned off and we use Cisco Security Agent (I don't think this is an issue neither as it has not caused a problem like this on any of our other machines).  We're running Symantec Antivirus v10.1.5.500 on that machine as well.  Machine also has Watchguard MUVPN without zonealarm installed on that machine but the user was on internal network and I made sure they had the MUVPN de-activated.

I've had issue with Intel ProSet conflicting with Windows Zero Config in the past so I only have the intel 3945ABG drivers installed and the wireless works fine except for when the intermittent problem occurs.  I also updated the newest version of both the 3945ABG drivers and the Broadcom drivers this morning.

The last time the user noticed this issue was when they returned to their computer at 14.20(GMT) today (28/05/2008) - although they had been away from their computer for up to an hour then.  They also had this issue yesterday about midday.  I've attached the system and application event logs (extension changed to .txt - you should be able to open them in event viewer if you change the extension to .evt - unfortunately parts of it appear in Polish) - I notice there has been a few tcpip events in the system logs possibly before or during the time the problems occured.

Any ideas on where to go next with this appreciated.

Answer : Intermittent Network Problem on Dell D630 - Has an IP and can ping out but can't accept ping or get internet

Sometimes, I have seen MUVPN causing problems so was asking if you uninstall it and check the results. Depending on results we can then proceed further.

Thank you.