Hello;
I do IT support for a small business. After doing clean installs from an image of Windows 8.1 on about half of our systems which are all HP Compaq Elite 8100 CMT PC's with Core i5 Processors and 4 GB or RAM, the users of at least 5 of them have complained that every couple hours, randomly Explorer closes. By having them do some tests I have found that only Explorer open to Network Shares and/or Adobe with a document open from a network share close on their own. Local Explorer windows open to locations on C:\ or Adobe Documents open to some location on C:\ don't close. No errors or even warnings are generated in any of these systems Event logs when these disconnect / reconnect events happen and the Network shares that momentarily disconnect can be on different servers. When they disconnect connect and reconnect it is not all a once but sort of cycles through the objects over ~ 30 sec to a couple min. time. I have all firmware / bios updates and latest drivers installed as well as all Microsoft updates applied including signed drivers from Windows Updates / WSUS. I have taken one of these systems and re-imaged it with Windows 8.0 Enterprise and the user no longer has this problem. None of my Windows 8.0 or Windows 7 users on the same network with the same PC platform have this issue. I have tried everything I can think of to fix this problem. I have even looked for errors on the Windows Server they have open files on when this happens and I have found not consistent errors corresponding to the times this happens on the Windows 8.1 systems. While I have witnessed it happen on a users computer, I can't reproduce it on any computers I use or even when logged in to their computers (as me) to date. I have been fighting this issue for well over a year now. I have checked for errors on switch ports and found nothing. I have checked for errors on the Domain Controller, DNS Server and mail server when this happens and I find no errors that correspond to the time these event happen or even close and certainly not repeating errors. At this point I'm considering packet capture but this is like looking for a needle in a haystack especially when I can't even pin point when it is going to happen. It doesn't happen on all the computers that are having this issue at the same time - as far as I can tell either. There has to be some bug in 8.1 that is causing this that is not present in 8.0 but I can't determine what for sure. My best guess is it some kind of Network interface driver issue. These system all have an onboard Intel 82578DM Gigabit Network Connection and have drivers provided by Microsoft dated 3/28/2013 Driver Version 12.6.47.1 installed, nothing newer exists. Any new ideas how to solve this would be we