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

Hi,

I noticed that the driver for network adapter was released  3/28/2013 before the released time of Windows 8.1, so It mostly likes driver compatibility issue. Have you manually checked the network adapter driver from its manufacture website and find the latest driver for Windows 8.1 system, or manually download driver for Windows 7\8, install it in your Windows 8.1 system as a test. It's recommended to contact the vernder to confirm the driver issue.

http://h20564.www2.hp.com/hpsc/swd/public/readIndex?sp4ts.oid=4098384

NOTE This response contains a reference to a third party World Wide Web site. Microsoft is providing this information as a convenience to you. Microsoft does not control these sites and has not tested any software or information found on these sites.

Hi Yolanda

Yes that was the first thing I did - check HP and Intel for an updated driver.  Neither HP nor Intel have released a newer driver for this onboard network interface controller.   The newest driver on HP's site for this system for Win 7/8.x x64 is dated Nov 2011.  The driver I have installed now came as a Windows Update after 8.1 was installed.  I have found that 1000's of other people have been having very much the same issue with Windows 8.1  on a Varity of systems old and new in another thread of the Windows 8.1 forum.   The consensus is that it is a problem with how Windows 8.1 DNS Client handles DNS differently than all previous version of Windows -which I don't know if that is true.   The fix for that supposedly is to point your DNS server settings  manually to googles servers.  This will not work in a Windows Domain environment.   The other fix for this that many posts claim works is to open a command prompt on the affected machine with elevated privileges and run this command.

 netsh winsock reset 

and reboot.   This info came from the forum thread below.

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/d799e421-c965-4b0c-9829-1dc2c37fbb58/windows-81-loses-internet-connectivity?forum=w8itpronetworking

Seems to simple but I'm trying it. I will reply and let you

Well the netsh winsock reset from the command prompt did not solve the problem at all.  I did it on three computers all having the same issue - momentary network disconnects and they all just kept right on doing the same thing.   Anybody else have any ideas?  I'm all out.  I can't say that I find Windows 8.1 a reliable operating system. 8.0 blows it out of the water for reliable operation. It seems that 8.1 is really picky about hardware, even identical hardware as I have some identical systems to the ones giving me this problem that are running Windows 8.1 from the same imaged "cloned" source and they run fine.   It is completely madding..  Making me like my Mac book Air all the more. 

Hi,

In my opinion, it mostly seems a device driver compatibility issue, have you contacted the HP support and see if they have workaround or any updates for this issue.

Regards.

Have you disabled Power Management functionality on the driver in Device Manager? Where connectivity is lost after a period of time, it is most likely the system disabling the NIC to save power.

Brandon
Windows Outreach Team- IT Pro
Windows for IT Pros on TechNet