Certain Steam Games killing Ethernet internet connection until full PC restart.

[FlyingScotsman]

I've only recently started experiencing this issue with certain steam games. I launch the game (most of them in full screen) and my internet connection to my Pc just dies. I'm using Ethernet so it's not Wifi dropping out. When I look at the icon it tells me there's not an ethernet cable connected (icon with a large red cross). This is fixed if I restart the PC completely.

My ethernet connection is connected to one of those boxes which plug in the wall and connect to the router (the one which goes through your Power wires. I unplugged it and it doesn't resume the connection like it normally would) and it's never had this issue before. I've got a static IP (it does it with the static IP and with a dynamic one so it doesn't make a difference). If I restart the router, the connection is still severed until I restart the Pc.

I thought it was because I never played the game enough and it did it for some odd reason (It only used to happened to games which I rarely played and games which I played often aren't affected) but now Skyrim is killing my connection (Which I played frequently, left for a month or so and came back to when Dawnguard was released).

As far as I know it's not a firewall issue or Anti virus issue as it's never done this until quite recently (haven't changed anything at all so it maybe a steam related issue). All drivers are up to date.

If it's any help I'm running Windows 7 Home Premium.

This is a strange case because it used to only happen if I used games on the disk (Bioshock 2, Fallout 3 etc but at that time I was using XP and not 7) but now it's moved onto Steam.

Any idea on what's causing it and if possible how to fix it?

[itisjuly]

When you go into network view where it shows all the connections, does it fix when you press disable and then enable on the connection?
If not, try going into hardware manager and disabling/enabling the network device.