A brief perusal of Google and MS TechNet says I'm not alone.
It's been a few weeks since my final upgrade to Vista. About 3 days after the upgrade, my router froze. I wasn't even sure what had happened, since the trusty Airlink AR525w had run solid since I first connected it 6 months ago when I moved into my current apartment. A power cycle got 'er going again. A couple of days later, it froze again. That day it froze 3 or 4 times. Since then, I've lost count of how many times the router froze.
Somehow, I just didn't want to blame Vista for this problem. Surely the router was going bad. But what were the odds it would go bad at the same time I install a new OS?
So then a friend of mine buys a new computer. I help her assemble it, and we decide to try Vista on it, using my CD without a key, so she could see if it would work before buying it. Networking is intermittent. I blame the network driver, since the board was not Vista certified, and switch to a slightly different version of the driver (generic Marvell Yukon rather than the vendor specific driver). It appeared to be a little better, so I went home. Today she called me and was quite furious at me for "making" her install Vista, because she continues to have connection troubles. Rebooting the router seems to help, she says, but they come back.
Coincidence? We're running different hardware with different routers - an Airlink for me, a Netgear for her. She's on cable, and I'm on DSL.
So tonight, after yet another crawl under the desk to reset the router, I do a search for "vista router problem". I saw a huge list of hits - all of them right on the money with the symptoms. Turns out there's a Vista flaw with SPI (Stateful Packet Inspection) routers. A ZDNet Article Here: Link describes the troubles that Ed Bott experienced. He also specifically mentions NetGear and Linksys routers as examples of those with trouble. My Airlink AR525w is a Linksys clone - almost anything that applies to a Linksys applies to it.
Here's the really good part He posted that a year ago. People have been struggling with this bug for a YEAR! Either that, or I'm wrong, and both my friend and I are having a different issue. I don't think so, however.
(EDIT) Upon further research, this appears to be related to a bug with a new feature called "Scaling". Microsoft claims it is not a bug - it is a feature - and blames router manufacturers who don't support it. That of course is bull, since it wasn't a feature that needed supported previously, and Microsoft's inept handling of it broke a lot of routers, which aren't likely to ever be patched to support a totally new feature. For Beta 2 of Vista, they released a patch to fix the problem. And, sure enough, on my friend's computer, I actually got the disalogue box telling me it was "disabling" an incompatible feature (appropriately vague, that). Her connection was fine then - until the next reboot. Subsequent attempts to diagnose/repair the connection said nothing was wrong, but the behaviour remained. MS says this isn't a bug - they say it's fixed - but the fact remains that if I'm going to continue using Vista, I'm going to end up having to buy a new router. And I'm rather pissed off at that, because in this case it is Microsoft's fault things are broken, not the vendor. Routers should not be on the list of hardware that becomes incompatible with an OS upgrade!
So what is to be done? I'm going to attempt to disable SPI and see what happens. If it fixes the problem, then I'll know for sure they completely ignored a year's worth of bug reports. But ultimately, that's not a solution. Disabling SPI really cripples the router. Don't wanna do it.
How has your experience been? Do you have a router that works correctly with Stateful Packet Inspection enabled, or does yours have issues as well?
I have managed to find a workaround for this - it is posted here Link on my new website.