I'm going to bump this thread because I'm seeing the same general
thing: Vista Business on a Dell Vostro_200. Worked fine for a few
weeks, then suddenly we couldn't connect to the network. I swapped
cables with a known good box, no joy. NIC passes all it's self tests.
Checked all the network configurations, looks fine. Restored to prior
week, no joy. PING 127.0.0.1 gives "General Error" (!?!?)
After checking around on the net, I read that someone with this
problem was able to get the machine on the net in Safe Mode (with
network support) so I tried that. Sure enough, the machine is up on
the net no problems! So the hardware is NOT the issue. Called Dell
support who had me try hours of different things, turning off auto
loading of programs, disable windows IPSec, turn off firewall, disable
AVG, uninstall AVG, etc... NO freaking joy at... all...
So we ended up reloading Vista on the machine from the factory restore
(which is built into the hard drive). To give credit where due, it
only took about 10 minutes... Pretty darn fast considering. I just
have to reload all the apps...
But now I don't want to put anything on the machine for fear of
loosing time if this happens again.
I would love to hear if anyone has suggestions that we didn't already
try.
--
James.