Vista SP1 breaks networking

[Guest Andrew]

After SP1 downloaded as an automatic update, Vista Bus. Ed. became highly

unstable and repeatedly dropped the LAN connection to the ADSL router, and

only a reboot would bring it back.

 

My support call to Microsoft got a really very unhelpful response, saying

that I should do a hardware compatibility check before installing the

update. They have to be joking. The fact that it was an automatic update

escaped them entirely. I don't think they even read my email - I suspect it

was automatically generated from keywords.

 

After hours of messing around trying all sorts of different things,

resetting my router, changing the network card, etc, I finally found that if

I turned off automatic acquisition of the TCP/IP address for the network

adapter, and hard-coded that and the DNS address, the system was back to

normal.

 

My question is why on earth did the update do that? How many PCs are now

crippled because people don't have the expertise to fix the problem?

 

Andrew

(I'm glad I got that off my chest.)