Hi everyone, Literally it is just as I said in the Subject, I lose connectivity to the network when I unlock my Vista (Vista Home Premium) laptop. The laptop isSony VGN-AR590E. Details are below: - I seem to maintain connectivity while locked. However, when I unlock it is when my Gmail disconnects, my IM accounts disconnect, etc. Typically if I lose the network while locked then I unlock it to find everything disconnected; though now with Vista I seem to lose everything only when I unlock. I just now ran a quick test: "ping www.google.com -t" and sure enough, I was able to maintain a ping while locked, but once I unlocked it, the pings stopped with "PING: Transmit failed, error code 1231", then after a few seconds the system reconnected and the pings continued. - Needless to say, the Event Viewer has NO useful information. - This occurs regardless my use of Ethernet or Wireless - I use 3 methods for locking the workstation - 1) A shortcut (rundll32 user32.dll, LockWorkStation); 2) [Windows button] + L; or 3) The 3-finger salute. All 3 methods produce the same result. - I couldn't find anything on Sony's support site about it. I've googled this issue to death. I couldn't find anything on MS support site about it. - Lastly while unlocking the workstation, the system seems to undergo A LOT of stress or something. The sound it makes actually skips alot and the screen dims dramatically, then a second later the screen turns off and back on, but for less than a second. - Oh, and...They don't make XP drivers for this laptop so XP is not an option ;-) (But if you know otherwise, I'm open to suggestions). Any thoughts/ideas on this issue? Thank you! Gene

Gene, Have you figured anything out about this as of yet?I have a Sony laptop too and this happens with me too.

Hi Jonathan, Unfortunately no, I haven't learned anything new regarding this issue and its quite a frustrating issue at that. If I can ask, what model is your laptop? Cheers, Gene

I have a Sony Viao VGN-FE890N. I went to the Sony Style store and verified it one other laptops to make sure it just wasn't me.

Hi Jonathan, As I (and you as well, I'm sure) expected, Sony support was useless. They told me to reinstall the WLAN driver. However, it did give me another idea to test it out in Safe Mode with Networking and the issue could not be replicated - I was able to maintain a ping to google.com without incident. I figured the worst I could do was kill my box, so I disabled a ton of startup items and Services. Altogether, I killed about 30 startup apps and Services; there's so much bloatware here its ridiculous. Unfortunately, this didn't produce any different results. Ironically, my CPU and Memory levels are identical after I disabled everything to where they were BEFORE I disabled anything; thats really sad. If you come up with anything, please let me know as well. Also, I forgot to mention this in my original post, but during the unlock process, my CPU maxes out at 100% for several seconds. Cheers, Gene

Gene, I looked into this a bit more this evening. It appears that the WLAN Auto-Configure stops and restarts upon unlocking. This is the route I am going to be looking into a bit more as it appears to be the culprit. Feel free to contact meat my e-mail address: jjdavis @ gmail . com . Jonathan

Gene, I have had exactly your problem for 6 months. Its been a real issue since I'm travelling and many of the networks I encounter are not always happy to reconnect! I have just realized that is the fault of Sony's Wireless Switch Setting Utility. Normaly this is configured to run at startup and appears as a green box in the task tray. When I disbaled the utility the issue went away. Unfortunately I like the utility since it switches off bluetooth and gives me a tiny bit more battery life. My workaround is to allow the utility to start and then exit it. However this still leaves you needing to manualy re-run the utility and then exit it afterresuming from hiberanation (its at C:\Program Files\Sony\Wireless Switch Setting Utility\Switcher.exe) Hope this helps.

Okay, I have this same problem on my Sony Vaio FZ180E running Vista Home Premium. Luckily, thanks to you Giles, I finally found the way to stop it. However, is there a way to permanently disableit from runningin the future like when I start my computer? I ran the MSCONFIG utility, went to startup, but "switcher.exe" is not on that list. Unless I'm blind, there is no other way to disable it. Well, actually I have been thinking of uninstalling the utility, but I'm afraid it will screw up my wireless card entirely. It does annoy me that if there is no other to disable that I will have to right click on the green box and click exit everytime I start my computer. Thanks in advance! --surfingtheweb

Folks -Same issue here. The event viewer indicated that the NIC was requesting/renewing its dynamic IP any time I unlocked. A simple way around this is to give yourself a static IP. Not an entirely elegant solution, but it does prevent this problem.Have fun,

Folks -I think I have finally (after another 30 minutes or so of thinking...) gotten to the bottom of this - for me at least. The NIC that I have (Intel 82567LM) has a "smart" feature that lowers the link speed to save power. Any time the system goes into a non-use state (screen off, possibly screensaver), the link drops to 10-half to save power. Of course, this requires negotiation with the router. The routerI'm connected toseems to not lower link speeds gracefully. Similarly, when the system goes back into a use state, the link tries bumping back up to 100-full - once again requiring some negotiating with the router. With the solution mentioned earlier, the problem still happens, but it removes the DHCP part of the re-negotiation which allows (my) connections to stay alive.To fix this problem in a much cleaner way, I simply set my link speed to 100-full instead of auto-negotiate. This forced the NIC to stay at 100-full, so it doesn't attempt to move to a lower power state when not in use. It never tries re-negotiating with the router, and therefore never loses connectivity. Perfect? No. Better than my static IP solution? For sure. And it lets you run with DHCP, so your laptop is, once again, portable across networks. The ULTIMATE solution would be to leave the link as auto-negotiate and disable the power-saving "feature" of the NIC - but I have not been able to find this option in my drivers. Your milage may vary...Have fun,