Windows Vista Killed my Network

Good thing my wife noticed that whenever I booted up my brand-spanking-new HP Pavillion dv7-1232nr, our whole wireless network would stop working. Nobody had internet connectivity!

Strange. REALLY strange. An OS that can bring down your network?!!!

After wading though a lot of MS propaganda (they must hire blog writers on Mechanical Turk) that the problems are with "your outdated router" I came across this post which explains that you should disable IPv6 in Windows Vista. I'll repeat here:

Ok, I think I figured it out: I had the same problem as people on this thread ... the WRT110 router with firmware V 1.0.04 crashed as soon as my HP Laptop with Vista and 3945A chipset tried to connect. 100% consistent.

This is the fix that worked for me: I went to the Control Panel --> Network connections ... right clicked on the "wireless" icon and selected "properties" from the menu, then I UNCHECKED the "Internet Protocol Version 6 (TCP/IPv6)" entry ... and clicked OK. That's it, now it works reliably, never had a problem since!

I am disappointed in the Linksys service though, I would have figured they would have helped in this case instead of letting the customers spend HOURS to figure it out.

I also saw some posts which state that you should disable UPnP on the router. That didn't work for me, but YMMV.

Update (2010.03.11): This post seems to have figured everything out: http://keyliner.blogspot.com/2008/12/vista-unidentified-network-problem.html