ok, so heres the problem.

I have 2 laptops from 2 seperate offices demonstrating the same symptoms. Their built in nics seem to disconnect/reconnect every 20 seconds. I figured it might be the cable, so I swapped it with one that I know for sure works, and it still disconnected. So I figured the nic might be bad, so I disable the nic and install a USB Nic. Same thing happens. I figure it might be a virus, because in the past ive seen it caused by a virus. I run 3 different virus scans all in safe mode from 3 differnt companys...McAfee, Norton 2004, and Housecalls online scanner. They werent able to find anything. I run 3 different Anti Spyware programs and remove everything, to no avail. The settings are correct, I am the on-sight tech here, and everything is set correctly...so Im stumped, im just about to reformat em. cuz im 99% sure its not hardware related, but some kinda software issue.

Anyway, i thought I would turn here first before I reformat em. Good luck answering this one, its a doozy.

-Ernie

Don't rule out a virus just yet. It is possible that the virus loads itself in memory and seems innocuous when not loaded. This might be why the anti-virus programs did not detect it, because, as you wrote, you ran them in safe mode. Try running them in normal mode and make sure you have the most updated signature files. It might be a virus or some other issue with registry settings or incompletely uninstalled software.

Your best bet, regardless of whether or not it is a virus would probably be to backup all important files and reformat/recover the hard drives. Just make to sure to enact more strict security measures immediately after reformatting so that this doesn't happen again.
Try an anti-virus such as Norton which has a combination of anti-virus, spyware/adware blocking, script blocking, and a firewall. Make sure whatever active monitoring settings are available are turned on. The use a slight bit of memory and a tiny percentage of CPU time, but they are very worth it.
Hope that helps.

thats basicalyl what I did, i backed up all the important stuff, and just reformated it, and tossed on the latest and greatest firewall/anti virus solution..hopefully they do the trick..thanks man

E

also, i figured out the problem, i noticed only one commoninity in all the PCs, and thats that they all had the 2 wire software installed...so I just uninstalled it, and they all worked perfectly...kinda bunk eh..dunno what was going on..but once i removed the 2 wire software for home DSL. It all worked fine...

E