That link about the DCHP lease was the answer for me. It also explains why I was getting dc’ed every hour exactly as the lease expired. I am sure changing the lease timeout from 3600 (seconds) to a higher number helps but I managed to fix it without changing that number. The problem isn’t the number but that the computer is not auto-renewing it before the expiration like it should. For me, what did the trick was the following (hit enter after steps 2-5):
- open command prompt with admin rights
- type netsh winsock reset
- type netsh int ip reset
- type ipconfig release
- type ipconfig renew
- restart your computer
After the restart I had a new one hour lease when I looked at ipconfig /all, but now it auto-renews before the expiration like it should. I have no idea how that all got corrupted for people but this seems like a simple fix. Thanks for the link Kneanderthal.
A final note: the auto-renewing has been working fine for several hours but since I do not know what garbled the DCHP lease process in the first place, I have no idea if it might return at this point.