You could try Broadcom drivers, latest ones here: www.broadcom.com/.../netxtreme_server.php

We did download them from that site, but when we try to install them (there is no exe file) Windows says it is already using the most up to date driver and stays on the windows default driver.

You have to install them manually, device manage > network adaptors. select device, right click and select update drivers. Select Browse my computer for driver software, Select 'Let me pick from a list, then click 'Have disk', Browse to the folder where the drivers are, select the inf and click next. The drivers should install/update

I'm just brain storming here, but perhaps unchecking the "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power" in the power management tab of the nic properties will make a difference? I'm also curious as to what the troubleshooting app says if it is run on the nic while in this state, perhaps it will yield clues.

Oh, and if you have a BMC or idrac express shared on the nic, try disabling them so they arent sharing the port with the nic.

We will try this but as of right now after the last reboot the issue hasn't reappeared.  We turned off most of the features (like Checksum Offload) and rebooted and it has been ok.  We unchecked allow this device to save power.

I think we might have the same problem on our Dell PowerEdge T110. It is a W2K8 server (x86) domain controller running DHCP and DNS servers amongst other things. The box has a single Broadcom Netxtreme Gigabit Ethernet adaptor connected into the company network via a gigabit switch and routers (all manufactured by NetGear). Intermittently, we would get a DNS problem on our clients. No event logs indicating the cause of the problem. Using Wireshark and some of my own tools, I tracked this down to an intermittent failure to reply to a DNS request on the server. This would cause a whole bunch of knock-on effects on NBNS which had me well confised for a while. Anyway, during these periods of outage, we found we could not connect to the server using RDP either suggesting that it was not so much a DNS problem but one to do with general networking. We turned off the power option to stop the system putting the network card to sleep, but this did not help. We temporarily disabled the firewall, but this did not help either.

Yesterday, I was searching the web for something else and came across some people with similar problems using the same NIC. They seemed to have resolved the issue by updated the network card driver. So I downloaded the latest driver from Broadcom (14.8.0.5) and updated it. I have not had any problems since, but it's very early days.

Problem returned so still unresolved. Any ideas?

have you tried the latest nic firmware: www.dell.com/.../DriverFileFormats

OK, I downloaded the package NETW_FRMW_WIN_R319248.EXE (version 6.5.0.131) signed by Dell in November and labelled:

Dell Update Package: Broadcom BCM95708C PCI-E NIC, BCM5708 Copper LOM, BCM5708 SerDes (Fiber) LOM, BCM5709C Dual Port NIC without iSCSI Offload, BCM5722 Based LOM, BCM95722 PCI-E NIC, BCM57710 10GBase-T Dual Port Rack Mezzanine Card, BCM57710 10GBase-T Single

I installed the package with no problems and rebooted as requested. Let's see if that's any better. Thx.