Problem with Windows 7 64-bit network - fixed - but what was the problem?

On Monday, my Dell M6400 laptop running Window 7 64-bit started to drop the network session every 45 minutes or so.

Initially I thought it was the cable connection - but checking other PC's and no one else had a problem.

I was getting the yellow triangle appearing over the network icon in the tray. Sometimes when it happened you could see the icon change as it attempted to recover the connection. Sometimes it reconnected, sometimes it didn't. A couple of times I was forced to reboot - but it wouldn't shut down - I had to do a hard shutdown to reboot.
When I got home I encountered the very same issue - so that ruled out the internal network in the office.

Tuesday the problem got worse, I was having to reboot more frequently - and now, not only did I get the yellow triangle, but the red X over the network icon or losing it entirely. Trying to run the Broadcom diagnostics at this point resulted in a network device not found message and the broadcom software shutting down. Dell thought the driver was the issue - so I disabled the network and reloaded the broadcom driver form a fresh copy. Still had the same problem.

This morning the problem was worse. Even before the laptop could fully initialize all the startup programs, the network would drop and disappear. Checking the Cisco hub, the lights were out whenever the Red X appeared or the icon disappeared.

Firing the laptop up in safe mode, the network was fine... hmm....

So it kinda ruled out the network adapter hardware.

I went into MSCONFIG and disabled all the services and startup functions and rebooted. Initially I was planning on starting each little by little to find the problem. But in disabling all the services, I couldn't get the internet connection to work.

So I reset the MSCONFIG options back to normal and rebooted and to my surprise the problem has gone away... huh...

What got fixed? I'm puzzled as to what happened and what got reset. Any ideas?

BTW, the last Windows software upgrade was done early the week before. No obvious new stuff loaded on the machine - and it's been working fine for the last 9 hours.

If this happens again, what should I be looking for?

 

I forgot to mention - this is not a wireless connection I have wireless disabled on the laptop.

 

Is that perhaps another way of resetting the Internet Protocol???

That would be handy, but I don't see how that would work.

 

I suspect part of the issue was related to the laptop going into hibernation - or rather coming out of hibernation - and not handling it correctly. A few times in the past the network wouldn't change over gracefully when I plugged the laptop in the house network - usually after the laptop hibernated. When I look through the various hibernation / sleep options, there's no capability to hibernate the tethered network - just the wireless network which I think is a little strange.

I found it interesting using the MSCONFIG disable / enable function reset whatever was causing the issue - so something to keep as a possible option to solve what appear to be driver/configuration issues in the future.