Vista - Access: Limited Connectivity

I'd talked earlier about the problems that I had getting internet connectivity once I did the upgrade to Vista. Well it only took 3 months but I've finally found the solution to the problem. This is the link to the Microsoft knowledge base article that describes the fix.

Apparently the problem is that Vista requires DHCP discover packets to have the Broadcast flag set which is something that some non-microsoft routers can't handle. XP Service Pack 2 had this flag automatically disabled. The fix requires you to make a registry modification - you need to set the DhcpConnForceBroadcastFlag in the registry to 0. The knowledge base article suggests first adding another registry entry but that doesn't really seem to work. You could try it if you want to.

PS: The article talks about GUIDs which are basically the identifiers for your network cards. You'll find that these are actually long strings of numbers like D4-06-A1...

Leave a comment to let me know if it worked for you, or if you've got some other solution in case this fix didn't work