HELP - Intermittent Internet connection

[rmiller1959]

I have a four-PC network with a Netgear RP334 Phoneline Cable/DSL router and Linksys Etherfast Cable Modem. Three of the four PCs work on the Internet without a problem, but one of them has given me fits for several weeks now. The PC in my daughter's room loses its Internet connection for no apparent reason, and I've tried everything I can think of, to wit:

1) Home Phoneline cards - I had a Linksys HPNA 2.0 PCI card in the problem PC, and replaced it with a Netgear HPNA card. The problem persisted.

2) Purchased a new PC for myself and migrated the others to my kids, which meant that the one previously in my office was now my daughter's PC. I kept the same hard drive from her previous machine. The problem continued.

2) Noted that my other daughter's PC (formerly the "problem PC") was having problems connecting to the Internet. Determined that the serial wiring of the phone jacks upstairs was causing problems for both PCs, so I switched them to Gigafast Powerline Ethernet bridges. My other daughter's PC now connects to the Internet without any problems via the Powerline interface (my PC connects directly to the router via Ethernet, and my wife's PC is using a Netgear HPNA card), but the PC in daughter #1's room still doesn't work properly.

3) I disabled the DHCP server in my router and assigned fixed IP addresses to each PC on the network, and pointed them to the router as the gateway and DNS server. The PC in daughter #1's room still connects only sporadically.

4) I swapped out a 10 MB RealTek PCI Ethernet card for a 10/100 Netgear FA311 PCI Ethernet card. Still no change.

The only component that hasn't changed is the hard drive, so now I'm wondering if I have a software configuration or Windows registry problem. A question: the local area connection is listed as "Local Area Connection 7" in "My Network Places." Is it possible that my card-swapping has left a lot of residual networking garbage in my Registry that is confusing the system? How do I scan the Registry to remove "Local Area Connections" 1-6?

I apologize for the lenghty post, but I've tried everything I know, and now I need help. If anyone has any ideas or suggestions, I'd really like to hear them. Thanks!

[Greenstead]

I doubt it is due to the left over local area connections. (I am up to local area connection 9). I would not recommend messing in the registry.

The other thing that has not changed is the tel cable to #1 daugthers room. Maybe it is damaged or runs near power cables causing interference. It might be worth getting a long tel extension lead to see that cures the problem (before re-wiring the house).

[rmiller1959]

Thanks for the clarification on the Registry issue.

In fact, I'm no longer using the phoneline connection for daughter #1's machine. I switched both her and her sister to a Powerline connection, and I apologize if that got lost in the long post I submitted.

While the HPNA technology worked well for my machine before I switched to a direct Ethernet connection, and it continues to work for my wife, it was a problem for my daugthers' machines upstairs. The phone company installed dual phone jacks downstairs for both me and my wife back when we had a second phone line for a dial-up connection. The phone lines upstairs, however, are wired in series (I know this because when I rewired daughter #1's phone jack, daughter #2's phone jack went dead!). Also, daughter #2's Internet connection dropped in and out at random, similar to what daughter #1's system was doing. The fact that they re-wired the jacks downstairs is the only explanation I have for why HPNA worked consistently on the two downstairs machines and not on the ones upstairs, and I confess I'm not an expert on telephone wiring. I switched to Powerline to eliminate the phone wiring as a cause of the problem, and daughter #2's connection has been fine ever since.

Using the ping command on daughter #1's machine, however, I could literally monitor the connection dropping in and out. Successive ping commands to the router would record 100%, 50%, 75% or 0% loss - there was never any consistency. I switched power outlets for the Powerline bridge, reconnected the Ethernet cable, even swapped out the Ethernet card for a different model and installed it in a different PCI slot from the other. The problem remains - just now, I ran four successive ping commands, and the results were 75% loss, 0% loss, 100% loss, 100% loss. I just checked

As you can imagine, I'm at the end of my rope on this one. It's got to be a configuration issue, since the hard drive is the only component that remains from the original PC that was in her room. The motherboard, CPU, networking technology, network card, wired connection type - all are different, but the result is apparently the same. I've just about concluded that my only option is to wipe the hard drive and start over, unless anything I've said here gives anyone a clue as to what is happening. Whatever the outcome, I appreciate your attention to this matter.