Windows 10 1909 & 2004 on multiple office laptops drop LAN & WiFi connections every 10-15 mins.

[HHAIT]

This is quite critical since we have about 200 people working from home, and many in the last 3 days have started to have this problem. What a horrible time for this to happen... it's obviously an update of some sort that has come down the line.

Here's the issue:  On or about June 20th we started getting reports from a couple of people that their internet connections were dropping every 10-15 minutes.  I assumed it was their WiFi or ISP issues.  Almost all of them (that have others in the house) said that their spouses did not suffer the problem on their laptops and were working fine.  I had them connect to a wired connection directly on the router.  The problem still persisted with the same pattern.  They were ok after a reboot for about 10-15 minutes and the drop would occur.

I got one of the laptops back in the office and confirmed it's not their ISP or Wifi. (hope to get more to test)

There were no recent updates that I could see in programs and features.

The curious thing is that IP/Network stack still seems to be working at a low level because I can still ping domain names out on the internet and IP addresses!  This problem only seems to affect GUI based aspects of Windows. So Browsers, VPNS, Network Shares through File Explorer, Outlook 2019, Skype for Business, Teams Clients all fail until the next reboot.

I tried all the usual things to try:

• run the troubleshooter, update all the drivers including BIOS, FW, Intel Management engine etc.  no help.,
• Update Windows 10 (which is next to impossible because the problem usually occurs in the middle of updates and they won't download)
• a bunch of netsh commands.  Netsh resets have to be performed at an admin level, so this is out of the question for people working from home.  Netsh commands temporarily bring back the connection, but after 10-15 minutes its gone again.
• I've scanned the system for virus/malware using a number of different tools including Malwarebytes and Eset Online Scanner in safe mode.
• I've tried removing the Eset antivirus software we use, tried uninstalling the Palo Alto Networks Global Protect VPN Client.  This did not help solve the problem.
• Tried disabling Windows Firewall
• Tried SFC /Scannow

As a last resort I performed a Windows 10 recovery on the laptop using the option to remove all installed software but keep the user data.  This took about an hour, and the laptop was fine again.  I had to re-install all the apps and software, but it has held up so far for the last 5 days.  I suspect it will get the problem again soon as this update or whatever it is hits again.

I can't do this for 200+ laptops.  It will bring the company to it's knees and like all companies, were are already strapped with Covid19 fallout.

Over that last five days July 3rd-8th it has spread to almost 40 people out of 200+ who are dependent on working from home!

Laptops affected:

• HP Elitebooks 840-G3/G4/G6 Windows 10 1909
• HP Elitebooks 850-G3/G4 Windows 10 1909
• HP Elitebooks X360-G6 Windows 10 2004

I believe this is wide spread, and may be isolated to HP Laptops or it may not.  But finding anyone else reporting this issue using google has returned little results so far and none have been exactly the same as this.

I appreciate any help anyone can provide.

Thanks

KevinD

[HHAIT · Accepted solution]

Well after many hours of debugging it DID turn out to be an older version of Eset Endpoint AntiVirus V6.2. Current is V7.3. It seems to be working fine now.

I have no idea why it manifested in the last 3-5 days when there isn't any clear updates to anything on the systems except for Office 2016 updates.