HP Officejet 6310 All-in-One & HP Laptop (Vista) - Sporadic Connection Loss?

[idfubar]

Our family has an HP 6310 AiO printer which is connected via ethernet cable to a router.  The iMac on our home network is able to utilize the printer to our satisfaction and doesn't exhibit any signs of a connection problem.

The HP laptop my dad purchased last year, however, is another story: the connection between the laptop and the printer seems to get "lost" every so often (i.e. the printer disappears from the operating system's "Printers" folder) and thus rediscovery of the device (via the installation bundle) for HP Solution Center functionality (i.e. printing, scanning, and faxing) is ultimately required.

The following document is helpful towards the ends of troubleshooting and/or rediscovering the device but doesn't state what the cause of the problem might be: http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c01474870&jumpid=ot_recdoc/c01529081/en_us/c0147...

Having to rediscover the device every few days via HP's installation bundle doesn't seem to be very practical; given that a live chat with HP support resulted in the original suggestion to rediscover the device I'm not only hesitant to ask HP for help but I'm left to wonder whether anyone in the HP user community has experienced this problem or found a better solution.

[idfubar]

An update:

Since installing the two "critical update" items published on 03-2009 and 04-2009 (listed on the "Microsoft Windows Vista" support page for the HP Officejet 6310 All-In-One) there have (so far) been no additional connectivity problems.  A brief check of the Windows Event Log on my dad's HP laptop before update installation revealed error events stemming from an SLP service.