IE dropping connection

[LinkZ]

I've been having a problem with Internet Explorer 9 on Windows 7 32-bit machines across the school for the last week where randomly the staff member will be browsing websites and email quite happily, then they will lose the ability to go to any website, getting the standard "Page cannot be displayed" screen. After around 2 minutes it will all come back to life and you'll be able to carry on as normal. This usually happens at least 3-4 times a day but only on certain machines. I have installed Chrome on the offending machines and whilst IE is broken Chrome continues to work just fine.

 

I have checked the event logs on all of the machines and nothing stands out.

 

I'm beginning to tear my hair out (what little is left) as I can't find any pattern that causes it, the machines it's happening on are different specs so I don't think it's a hardware issue as network shares continue to work as well as Chrome.

 

Does anyone have any ideas as to either fix this or at least get some better logs from the machine to see what could be causing the issue?

[Michael]

I presume DHCP and DNS are working OK? Is IE9 fully patched?

 

It's strange that the problem's isolated to just IE and nothing else. Do you have a proxy in place?

[LinkZ]

Yeah all the machines report back to a WSUS server and that is reporting that they have all the patches deployed through there. As far as I am aware DHCP and DNS are working just fine, lots of machines are working without any problems. We use Lightspeed which installs a client onto the machine but i've checked the logs for this and it's not crashing, plus normally if it does they still have internet but it will be very limited guest access (as it can't authenticate them to give them staff internet access), and any websites that it does block it shows a lightspeed ban page.

[RichB]

Are you losing IE connection or actually the network connection? (sounds stupid I know) We had an issue in the past where the network connection would disappear for 2 mins 3/4 times and it was a network card driver issue. Sounds exactly same as what the staff were reporting until we went to look into it further.

[LinkZ]

Are you losing IE connection or actually the network connection? (sounds stupid I know) We had an issue in the past where the network connection would disappear for 2 mins 3/4 times and it was a network card driver issue. Sounds exactly same as what the staff were reporting until we went to look into it further.

 

That's what I thought, but i've been over to their machines when it happens and they can still access the network shares, and I can still remote control their machine using ABTutor, so their network connection is still up.

[Michael]

If you open a command prompt and type ping google.com -t do you see any problems whilst using IE? This will prove whether it's losing the network connection or just the internet connectivity.

 

I would recommend updating network drivers anyway. They do make all the difference.

[LinkZ]

I will definitely give the network card drivers a go, see if that makes a difference, however I don't believe it's a DNS issue as i've installed chrome on the offending machines and that works flawlessly. I was initially content with just installing that on staff machines and everything will be fine but it won't fix whatever underlying issue is causing IE to not work.