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No wireless browsing after sleep


dougdeep

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I have Windows 8 installed on a Dell Inspiron 1318 notebook which has worked well for a year with the exception of internet browsing (using IE or Firefox) not working following sleep.  The browsers seem to hang saying “Waiting for [site name]” and eventually time out.  Bringing up Networks from the charms bar shows the wireless LAN is connected.   There is no problem when the computer is connected to the LAN by ethernet cable.  I poked around the internet and see there are others having this problem as well and I tried all the suggestions given.  Such as:

  • Make sure the wireless card's driver is up to date.
  • Make sure all the latest Windows 8 updates are installed.
  • Set the power management of the wireless card to “always on”.
  • Try a different wireless card (swapped out the Dell card for an Intel 3945ABG).
  • Try the Ipconfig release / Ipconfig renew method (worked once).
  • Make sure the wireless router has the latest firmware (it does but this problem also appears at a friend's house and at work).
  • Flush the DNS cache.

I also found a small shell script in a blog that could be automated to check network connections.  The script just pings a server outside the LAN by name every few minutes.  If it works, then the wireless card, the LAN, DNS, and the ISP connections must all be good.  If it fails, the script just resets the card.  I ran the script and noticed it never failed, even when IE or Firefox would hang.  The computer seems to have a good network connection – I can ping other computers, get time from an NTP server, and get mail from a POP3 server (using Thunderbird).

That suggests to me that the problem is in the browser's connection to the internet and not the computer's connection to the network (I could be wrong, of course).  When I checked “Internet Options” there don't appear to be any proxies in the way of connections.  Could Windows 8 be closing off ports needed by the browsers to function?  Where should I start looking problems?

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It would not be ports being closed. If a port was closed (80 or whatever) the browser should show a fail message immediately. Proxy settings in Internet Options only apply to IE and not Firefox.

What type of sites fail? Is it all sites or is it just HTTPS, HTTP or FTP type connections? All three types of addresses should be tested, using domain names. Alternatively you should also attempt to connect to a website via IP address, such as http://74.125.200.102/ (this is Google.) This also works https://74.125.200.102/ but you should get an Untrusted Connection type message.

Try disable any active protecting antivirus.

What happens if you turn off your wireless and try to reproduce the problem with a wired connection?

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I´ve seen this failure before and it was due to some malware altering the DNS. You could try to set the DNS manually and use for example OpenDNS´s servers at:

  • 208.67.222.222
  • 208.67.220.220
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  • 2 weeks later...

Thank you for your suggestions. I tinkered with the computer for hours this weekend to try out your ideas and a few others. Among the things tried:

  • Ran Malwarebytes and SuperAntiSpyware and had them check every file. Only a few tracking cookies showed up.

  • After laptop sleep, tried using HTTP://[numeric address] for several sites including local network but IE and Firefox still said “waiting for [site]”.

  • Found that mapped drives to local NAS devices also do not work after sleep when the browsers are hung up. Windows file explorer at least throws a timeout error and the mapped drives are marked with a red X.

  • One of my NAS devices has FTP and IE and Firefox will not connect to it after sleep, BUT running ftp from the command prompt works just fine (as does ping).

  • If the laptop is hanging after sleep with a wireless connection, turning off wireless and plugging in an Ethernet cable to the same network does nothing. HOWEVER, if the laptop is hanging after sleep with the Ethernet cable, unplugging it first and turning the wireless back on does fix the problem after the wireless connection is established.

 

That last bullet is a clue I'm sure but I don't know how to proceed. After sleep, clicking on the network connection icon (wired or wireless) always brings up assurances that there is an internet connection but it doesn't work correctly. Breaking the network connection and then re-establishing it makes the system create a new internet connection that does work correctly (same as a restart). It seems as though I need to find a way to make the computer break and make the network connection by itself after returning from sleep but is there even a way to let the system know it just woke up and should run some command (like a batch file)?

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Thank you for that link.  I tried all the suggestions in the article although some settings were already in use.

 

Another day of troubleshooting produced an observation that if, after sleep, no network connection is attempted for 5-10 minutes then the internet connections will be present and work solidly.  To find out why, I started looking in the Event Viewer and found these events present whenever the computer returned from sleep:
• Information - Change Reason: System time synchronized with the hardware clock.
• Information - The \Device\NDMP6 service entered the Intel® PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection state.
• Information - The system has returned from a low power state.
• Error - The Base Filtering Engine service terminated unexpectedly.  It has done this 3 time(s).  The following corrective action will be taken in 300000 milliseconds: Restart the service.
• Error - The Diagnostic Policy Service service terminated unexpectedly.  It has done this 3 time(s).  The following corrective action will be taken in 300000 milliseconds: Restart the service.
• Error - The Windows Firewall service terminated unexpectedly.  It has done this 3 time(s).
• Error - The Network Connected Devices Auto-Setup service terminated unexpectedly.  It has done this 3 time(s).

I looked up all those services on the internet to see what they were.  The two biggies here seem to be the Base Filtering Engine BFE) and Windows Firewall.  It seems that the BFE is needed to get anything else network related in Windows to work.  It is also a prerequisite for Windows Firewall service.  So it appears that the BFE is not starting successfully after sleep, at least for a while.  All four services mentioned in the Event Viewer will be found running in Services after a few minutes and then the internet browsers work correctly.

 

That notice in Event Viewer that the service will be restarted in 300000 milliseconds (5 minutes) is probably why internet connections will work fine if I wait before trying a browser or mapped drive.  How do you go about troubleshooting services like these that start eventually, just not when you expect them to?

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300000 milliseconds can be changed to 3000 milliseconds, which at least will be more convenient.

Maybe it could be useful if you could post where exactly can that value be changed? (or where it is the current 300000 ms currently set/stored)?

 

jaclaz

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Where it can be changed: Computer Management Console> Services> Rightclick in the desired service> Properties in the popup menu> Restore? (I'm not sure how it says it in English) tab.

Where it is stored: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\<Service Name> - FailureActions (if they are any, not that it is a binary value not easily interpreted).

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Thank you for those suggestions.  I went into Services and changed the Recovery tab for BFE to “Subsequent failures -> Restart the Service” and “Restart Service after: 1 minute”.  One minute seems to be the lowest it can go in this window (using “0.5” got me an error message).  If someone had the documentation on how Microsoft coded the binary value for this in the registry, I’m sure it could be less.  Still, one minute is better than the default 5 minutes (300000 milliseconds) and since it takes a bit of time after resume from sleep to display the lock screen and type in the password, that seems to be enough time for the BFE service to restart before Internet Explorer can get running.  The event log errors for BFE, Windows Firewall, and other network services still remained but everything seemed to be running before I could even get the Event Viewer open.

 

That made the computer usable but I still wanted to know why it needed to be fixed with a band-aid.  Looking at the Event Viewer for items before sleep, I noticed the entry for “Kernel-Power: The system is entering sleep” was followed by a half dozen entries of netwlv64 and event ID 5010.  That expands out to:

 The description for Event ID 5010 from source netwlv64 cannot be found. Either the component that raises this event is not installed on your local computer or the installation is corrupted. You can install or repair the component on the local computer.

If the event originated on another computer, the display information had to be saved with the event.

The following information was included with the event:\Device\NDMP6 Intel® PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection

So I went looking for an explanation of this on the internet.  It seems to relate to netwlv64 being the Microsoft catch-all driver for discontinued Intel (and other) wireless cards.  The wireless card is not responding as expected to whatever commands the driver is trying to send it prior to sleep and it probably not ready for the computer to suspend operations.  Consequently on waking from sleep, the wireless card is not ready immediately or is stuck in some confused state.  My card always seems to get running eventually but some users report hangs that last until a system restart.

 

Over in the Intel community forum there was a discussion about this event ID and the lack of Windows 8 drivers.  One of the users came up with a power shell script to reset the Wi-Fi adapter on wake from sleep.  I tried it and it works well.  The BFE and firewall errors disappeared in the Event Viewer after sleep.  You can follow the discussion for the fix at https://communities.intel.com/message/211923.

 

I can live with this for the time being and I’m hoping that going from Windows 8 to 8.1 won’t make things worse but I think the long range solution is to get a wireless card supported by the factory for Windows 8.  For Intel, that means only their wireless-N or Dual Band cards.  Plus, it has to fit the compartment in the notebook so this is another rainy-day project.

 

Thank you again for all your helpful suggestions.

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One minute seems to be the lowest it can go in this window (using “0.5” got me an error message).

 

On Windows XP the time is in milliseconds, I thought that it would be the same on Windows 8 (now I notice that it isn't).

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One minute seems to be the lowest it can go in this window (using “0.5” got me an error message).

 

On Windows XP the time is in milliseconds, I thought that it would be the same on Windows 8 (now I notice that it isn't).

 

But maybe the "limit" is in the way the data is visualized/edited.

What are the actual contents of the Registry key?

 

jaclaz

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This is an example:

 

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\AeLookupSvc - FailureActions:

 

Well, it is impossible to copy the binary data from the registry!

 

You can find a service with failure actions enabled and have a look at its HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\<Service name in registry> - FailureActions value.

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