Tricky problem...

 

Dell Inspiron 1150 Laptop with Broadcom 440x 10/100 NIC card

 

Upon boot-up 19 times out of 20 computer does not even know card is there (no entry in device manager etc...), but it does recognize it once in a great while and it works fine, so cannot be fried hardware.

 

I have installed all recent drivers and updates including BIOS, Chip Set, Device Driver, XP, etc...

 

I have also burned a CD DOS boot disk to run the asset utility to reset service tag, etc...

 

Interestingly, after booting from the CD, there is a much greater chance of recognizing the NIC card.

 

Last symptom... I cannot disable the password utility in BIOS (A07) even by entering <>.

 

My guess is that XP is somehow overwriting the BIOS NIC enable flag, forcing the system to not recognize the card.  I do not know how to check this hypothesis...

 

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.