On my computer, there is a really strange thing that happens frequently.  I have cable internet and am running Windows XP with SP2 installed.  About once or twice an hour (sometimes every few minutes), the default gateway on the connection just drops.  By drops, I mean it disappears.  When this happens, nothing internet related works and is only solved by doing a release-renew.

I have no problem with this happening when using Fedora.  This has been happening for the past few years, but recently it has gotten much worse.  Any ideas as to what is causing this issue, or even steps to remedy it?

POssibly too many cablesplitters.  You may be overloading your cable & then the internet flashes (that's what our comcast guy told me when ours was doing this)

I've had that issue in Windows XP SP2.  Well, not quite -- it normally reconnected automatically.  It's weird.  I reinstalled and it worked.  *shrug*

Well at least it sounds somewhat normal.  It's been ~4 years since a format, so that is a definate possibility at this point. 

I knew it wasn't a driver issue when it happened after I changed cards.