Ethernet Connectivity Issue (EP45-UD3P)

A few days ago, without apparent reason, my normally very well behaved machine started giving me a problem connecting to my Ethernet network. I do not know if this is a motherboard issue but I am suspecting it might be.

Normally, my machine connects to the network immediately when starting, either from sleep or a cold boot. A few days ago, it stopped connecting immediately and now takes a large number of minutes to finally establish a connection. Once it does, there is no more problem, until I shut it down and have to restart it or wake it up.

The W7 troubleshooter sometimes says there is a problem it cannot resolve with the network device and sometimes says there is a driver issue. I downloaded and installed new drivers from Gigabyte. I also tried both motherboard Ethernet ports. I replaced the Ethernet cable and tried plugging it into a different port and then plugging directly into the DSL modem, bypassing the router. All to no avail and the Device Manager consistently indicates the network devices are properly installed and operating.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

I did some more troubleshooting and determined this is a software issue, not a hardware/motherboard issue.

I replaced my C: SSD with a clone I made last week, before this problem developed. The problem does not occur booting off the clone so that precludes a hardware problem.

I still have to resolve the problem as I have done too much work with this computer to conveniently simply fall back to the clone.

Problem fixed.

Funny how you can spend hours unsuccessfully trying to resolve an issue, walk away from it, and come back later and solve it immediately.

I spent most of yesterday afternoon trying to fix the problem. Was at work all night, just got home, and had the problem fixed in minutes.

All I did was uninstall the network adapter from the device manager and reboot. When the machine rebooted, it automatically recognized the existence of the network adapter and reinstalled it. I now have network connectivity within one second of the Desktop being ready.

Nice one! Next time I have the same problem I'll do the same thing.