Realtek LAN Driver disappears  

I feel your pain! I was so frustrated with that driver issue. I installed a really old pci network card and have had no issues! very strange indeed! hopefully MS fixed this issue in the RC !

I've had this issue crop up a few times too. It usually shows itself while doing a Windows Update and then reboot..poof...nic is there but not connected. Happened after this mornings update of windows defender. I did a rollback/sys restore and all is well.

A8N-SLI
Onboard 1gb nic

Win7 7100 x64 shows it as NVIDIA Nforce

Maybe this issue needs to percolate a little.

I've had a problem too the Realtek LAN driver and this system I just upgraded (Gigabyte GA-MA790XT-UD4P). I installed Windows 7 7100 and the stock Win 7 drivers worked fine. Windows update showed a new Realtek driver, so I let it install. The NIC no longer worked.

I uninstalled via Device Manager and went to Gigabyte's Web site and downloaded the LAN driver for the motherboard (for Vista x64). This driver didn't work either.

I uninstalled again and let Windows install the stock driver. That got the NIC working again.

I then found a driver (just the INFs) at the Realtek Web site that worked (version 6.218 for Vista and Win Server 2008).

hi ya Wayward,

When I install the RC I will try your suggestions... I have a Biostar mobo and I had the same issue you had with Gigabyte. I will check out the Realtek link in your post and try that same driver version in the RC and see if it works for me as well.

thanks for update

I had the same problem my ethernet just disappeared from device manager a few days after windows 7 clean installation. I found 2 problems helped. The first thing I done was to check the power management settings in device manager. Make sure the option ' allow the computer to turn off this device to save power' is not ticked. That didnt make my adapter reappear but when I googled the problem it was something other people had experienced so I changed the power setting just in case, to avoid any future problems. What did make the ethernet reappear was there is apparently a bug causing people to lose their hard drive and ethernet on Asus boards when using windows 7. The windows 7 loads the bios and cant see either of the HD or ethernet, I was advised to try swapping over my sata cable to sata 1 or 2 connector on the board (if its connected to sata 1 swap it onto 2 and vice versa). I followed this procedure and rebooted and hey presto ! the ethernet was back in device manager and the connection active again and also no more start up bios error messages about a missing hard drive. Hope this helps folks!