Intermittent failures to connect with web links

I had a problem with intermittent failures in surfing on Windows 7, along with messages like this "Firefox can't establish a connection to xxx". Retrying the link would usually succeed within 3 or 4 attempts. IE was the same.

It's not a problem with the firewall or anti-virus because I've disabled both. I have 2 other computers on my network, one XP and one Vista, without this problem.

Rebooting the router helped, but the problem always reverted within a short period. I use a Netgear WGR614 router. Another symptom was that the Residential Gateway icon in the Network folder would show up after a router reboot (when it worked), but the icon later disapeared when the connection problems reappeared.

I've solved my problem by disabling UPnP on the router after I noticed that the Windows 7 PC was showing up as a UPnP device in the router web page. Of course, I've disabled UPnP on my router which doesn't sound right. I don't know too much about networking, so I'd like to know if there's a better way of restoring my ability to surf, and what problems I might experience by disabling UPnP.

John

Disabling the UPnP setting in router should be ok for the most part a lot of routers have it off by default and it can cause disconnects but you may find that you need it on for some bit torrent and maybe IM clients unless you set up the ports that would need forwarded manually