Realtek RTL8188ce slow to obtain IP

gang I know there's a smart guy lurking here somewhere....

this is driving me nuts: Thinkpad X120e Win7 x64 Home Prem - my tried & true do-all roadwarrior has developed a hiccup. The WIFI device PCI\VEN_10EC&DEV_8176&SUBSYS_819510EC&REV_01
has some issue that seems subjectively to have added a 1 minute delay in obtaining IP address. I've been through bunch of remove/remove-driver/reinstall etc etc to no avail. destroyed services, removed every posible thing hopping on the net ahead of it etc.

most telling is this: with no changes in hardware [in years], I simply took one of my spare drives and loaded win7 from scratch. voila', no issues. [took a days worth of updates but we got there.] every device driver and thingy in Device Manager looks the same. I am trying hard to come up with anything that is diff on the hard device side and can't find/see any such.

This has the AMD E350 APU, Hudson Chipset.
Driver files on this [my main SSD hard drive] and the 'test dummy' hard drive identical.

Windows Error logs are no real help. no network-related issues appear in the main "System" Events. Drilling down to the Diagnostics - Performance, the delay in bootup caused by this is obvious: its full of "Error" reds and "Critical" reds all related to standby, shutdown, bootup being out of bounds, but little/no data on which services are causing. occasionally I was getting usb device errors there but that seems related to the card reader. its not consistent.

clues?

Again, just in case you missed it: the two hard drives are the same. the device is the same. the router is the same. the only diff is 'fresh' install vs. not so fresh. The fresh one connects like it always has: before the desktop is even 'painted' the net is on the air.

I'd love to know how to debug this... i should have the skill but am defeated :cry

 

of course.
SSD is back in, and producing the same ugly behavior.

there's no jolting. very easy on this machine and I've done a lot of them

this should give some smart guy a clue: behavior is the same under safe mode + networking.

i have droids, IOS, win 10 and win 7 devices on this network, and this is the only one that behaves such. It must be - almost HAS to be something leftover from some program that steps in the way of the IP address being obtained.

for anyone familiar with Router Advertisement: is it a problem [like a REAL problem] to get Event ID 1006 regularly? I can see why I might have this condition [detail below] but I doubt seriously it has anything to do with the problem I'm trying to solve. webbing about, I see a LOT of posts on the topic and the usual answer is a shrug... "so what".

Log Name: Microsoft-Windows-Dhcpv6-Client/Admin
Source: Microsoft-Windows-DHCPv6-Client
Date: 10/14/2015 1:27:37 PM
Event ID: 1006
Task Category: Media State Event
Level: Information
Keywords:
User: LOCAL SERVICE
Computer: Shire-X
Description:
Router Advertisement settings have been changed on the network adapter 18. The current M - Managed Address Configuration flag is true and the O - Other Stateful Configuration flag is true. User Action: If you are seeing this event frequently, then it could be due to frequent change in M and O flag settings on the router in the network. Please contact your network administrator to have it resolved.
Event Xml:
<Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event">
<System>
<Provider Name="Microsoft-Windows-DHCPv6-Client" Guid="{6A1F2B00-6A90-4C38-95A5-5CAB3B056778}" />
<EventID>1006</EventID>
<Version>0</Version>
<Level>4</Level>
<Task>1</Task>
<Opcode>13</Opcode>
<Keywords>0x8000000000000000</Keywords>
<TimeCreated SystemTime="2015-10-14T18:27:37.708878800Z" />
<EventRecordID>733</EventRecordID>
<Correlation />
<Execution ProcessID="756" ThreadID="1780" />
<Channel>Microsoft-Windows-Dhcpv6-Client/Admin</Channel>
<Computer>Shire-X</Computer>
<Security UserID="S-1-5-19" />
</System>
<EventData>
<Data Name="InterfaceId">18</Data>
<Data Name="Flag1">true</Data>
<Data Name="Flag2">true</Data>
</EventData>
</Event>

 

Are the "Internet Options" ...Properties/Connections tab settings identical for both systems?

 

yes.
I have fought this thing 'silly' and resigned to have to rebuild os from scratch to get rid of the issue.
had a good chat with a brilliant friend who knows this turf cold and he was not at all optimistic. there are too many things, especially stuff packaged with network tools, sniffers, etc, browsers, anti-malware tool junk [which much of it is], etc that does not uninstall cleanly. further, odds are high that these leave no hint of their nefarious deeds in the event logs, which is the case here.
the only way to evade the issue is to turn off [disable] the adapter. in that case it boots pretty normal. even in SAFE mode + networking if the adapter is enabled it will incur around ~1minute delay. I can look at the boot trace and see all the events, tracking them by the tick of the clock, and there is always a combination of two [usually... I think I've seen a 1 event sometime] delays, which when added together come to around a minute +/- a few seconds... no more than that variance.
my best huge guess/leap-of-faith is that it is related to DHCPv6, but disabling that client is unproductive [which is well documented via many other threads listing scores of degradation issues with dhcpv6]. and you can't uninstall that of itself. so can't do it for debug.