HelloThis subforum isn't the exact place for this question but it fits the best. I'm having a strange problem in our corporate network which consists of Xp's and Vista's. Some of our computers go into standby (sleep) while they're logged on and some don't. We have a no-standby policy on our Xp's but we want to try and go a bit "greener" in the future and left the standby option enabled from our Vista's on. The strange thing is that 5 testmachines which I used don't go into standby while they're logged on. This happens on both Xp and Vista. If they're logged off, it works perfectly. Some other machines in the field do it like it should, go into standby whether someone is logged in or not. Putting a machine in standby mode while logged in manually works as well. All these machines are getting the same policies. Anything I'm missing?This is actually only half my question because the real issue i'm facing is that when they go into standby the network is shut down. Desktop icons and other user settings are stored on the network (roaming profiles) and when they take their computer out of standby the icons are gone since the network connection was gone. I'm not 100% sure the network is lost only when going into standby because I have to rely on user evaluation. At least in my own test the network is indeed shut down during standby which is a good thing, but not in a corporate environment. I have to assume it only happens during standby since there is no reason why network access should disappear on so many computers at random and my own tests confirm that. Pressing F5 brings the icons back of course after the network connection has been established once again, but that is a too tedious task for our various users. All those machines are using a built-in NIC from Intel 82567LM-3. There is an option in the driver to not allow the system to shut it down to preserve power but it doesn't work. The network connection is lost anyway.I can of course not allow standby mode like on our XP's and then the NIC would have 100% uptime but then we loose all the power saving options we'd like to implement.Any suggestions on those 2 questions?

Not sure how applicable this statement is to motherboards produced in the past 2-3 years, but from my experience in dealing with sleeping NICs from a few years back, keeping the NIC from going into sleep mode with the computer is an option in the BIOS that can't always be overridden from the software - you actually have to disable it in BIOS. You might want to check to see if the sleep/standby settings for your integrated NIC are enabled or not. As far as the first part of your question, I can tell you from my past experience with larger-scale IT settings, all machines, regardless of policy, don't always act alike no matter how cloned they are. I've had XP machines that constantly lost their mapped drive connection after a period of inactivity even though it was a persistent connection with their login, and the next one or two next to it would never lose their connection until the computer was logged off or shut down. It's one of those "head scratchers" of large-scale deployments.