Lost Network Connectivity on a Dell Precision 470 Running Vista

I ran into an interesting situation on my older Dell Precision 470 running Vista. For some reason a few days after I installed Vista it wouldn’t maintain network connectivity. I’d get a little yellow triangle – the warning icon – stating that I’m not authenticated on the network. I tried installing the latest drivers, I tried bypassing the integrated network controller by placing a network card in the box. I even disabled the on-board controller in the bios. Nothing worked. It would connect for a little bit, drop, and then reconnect. incredibly frustrating.

I did some searches using all the keywords I could think of. I finally came across something that sounded similar. The reports had to do with connecting to small business server but the symptoms were the same. So I tried what they suggested and it worked. To get it working I had to disable IPv6 on the properties for the connection. Doing this solved all of my problems. This shouldn’t be a problem as I don’t believe we’re going to exclusive use of IPv6 anytime soon. There may be some other implications but those aren’t clear to me just yet. For now my connectivity is working as expected.

I don’t generally like to blog about these topics – at least not on this blog – but since I had such trouble finding a resolution I thought I should do a posting so that others might benefit from my experience.