Vista - router drops after vista 64 sleep

I am having the same problem with vista sleep. when it awakes my connection drops then goes to red x then sometimes it will reconnect. while it is trying to reconnect my linksys router will cycle completely off for a few seconds then come back on. if it happens quick enough everything comes back up ok. if not I may lose the router or lose connectivity for other pc's using the router and then have to reconnect with them. I have 3 pc's, one running xp pro with ethernet connection, one running vista 32 with wireless, the one causing the problem is new sony running vista 64 and ethernet cable, and I have a ps 3 running wireless. all are connected most of the time, but the new sony with vista 64 will take down the router when it comes out of sleep. if I recycle the router everything comes up clean until the next time the sony goes to sleep. I am starting to think that windows live onecare is part of the problem. but I can't turn it off. it came with the machine. any ideas?

Disable UPnP on the router if it's currently enabled, just as a test. At that point, if the "problem" Vista machine still somehow manages to knock out internet connectivity for other clients when it comes out of sleep, your problem is almost certainly a hardware one on the router.

Other than UPnP, there is no (software) way for any client machine to induce that type of problem in the overall setup, short of running a DHCP server or purposefully launching attacks, which is obviously not the case here. Once UPnP has been removed as a variable, you've got some sort of voltage/signal/digital electronics problem between the NIC on the Vista machine and the router. Testing with a different NIC on Vista may help in that case.

The new SONY computer came with a trial version of Windows Live OneCare preinstalled. I suspected it might be part of the problem because it was the only thing that was different from my other Vista PC. I could turn off most of the features in OneCare but there wasn't any way to turn off the application. I really wanted to evaluate it because it has some features that appeared to be useful. Out of frustration, I finally uninstalled OneCare, and all of my problems seem to be fixed. It is interesting that when I initiated the uninstall from the control panel, Microsoft popped up a questionnaire asking if I was uninstalling because of connectivity problems. I have been running for about 48 hours now, doing all of the things that were taking the router down and so far everything works as it should.

Anything which includes a driver - like AV does - can theoretically interfere with the power state transitions of a machine. However, there is no way that the actions of any one single box should be taking out your router, unless it's sending out some sort of router configuration info.

I'm glad to hear that your problem has seemingly been resolved, but from a purely technical angle there is a secondary issue with the router.