Wireless drops connection reboot brings it back up security, WEP or WPA

I had a marvell wireless card today that would get on the wireless and stay online for a while. Then it would drop off the network connection. Two other laptops in the same office stayed on the entire time. I knew by that clue that it was something isolated to that PC.

Each time I rebooted, it connected right to the network, but after anywhere from a few minutes to about 2 hours, it would disconnect from the network again. Oddly it still had the ip address and gateway assigned via dhcp, but it could not ping the wireless access point or any other machine inside or outside the network. I tried to do the repair thing on the wireless adapter and that pretty much hung up the application. Log files did not reveal anything on the situation.

A little research showed that the type of drivers, NDIS i bleieve, would sometimes lose the SSID when using WEP security on a router. I tried getting the newest drivers but they were dated as of 2004. I know, just get a new wireless card for $10. No, I pushed on, I tried changing the type of encryption. An article I read said using WPA2 would stop the wireless card from dropping off the network. This card did not support WPA2 but did support WPA with TKIP. I tried that and it seemed to work, I will update after further testing.

So if your wireless adapter drops connection to the internet after some time, then try changing your security settings from WEP to another type, like WPA or WPA2 and see if it helps in your situation.

Regardless, seems it has to do with the driver for the card, and a new card replacement should do the trick.