Thanks. This gave me an idea. I noticed that after I switched from Win 7 to Win 8.1 at Win 8.1 log in screen network adapter showed no connections but just before I entered desktop I saw that it changed to "connected", so it means that for some reason the connection happened few seconds after entering the log in screen. Not sure what is the reason for that. Maybe some bios setting which puts network adapter into sleep..
So now I did the following:
1. manually entered network adapter settings.
2. removed the contents of "symbols", which I had manually created while extracting "en_windows_8_1_symbols_x64_2712576". (+4gb ).
3. restarted the machine..
4. great success <- it downloads symbols automatically.
By the way, I am using Close All to close opened apps and windows with one click. Close All allows you to specify apps you wish to leave open when you hit use Close All, and I indicated dwm.exe as one of them - but still whenever I click on CloseAll it tries to close dwm.exe.
Now when using Close All it makes dwm.exe close and restart it - basically you get the same effect which you would get if you tried to manually close dwm.exe window. Maybe there's a command line which would work ? I was thinking that maybe there is other hidden process running in the background which I could specify in CloseAll target settings ?