Oops. The model number for the board in question is Asus P5B-E not P5N-E.
Sorry everyone. Anyway...

This board (with Vista Home Pre) is now back with the customer, hence my
memory failure with board ID. And unfortunately I cannot check bad driver
details. That's my unshakeable excuse for all you nit-picking sceptics out
there.

Graig, your experience is very interesting. This difference in behaviour
requires explanation. Here are some thoughts.

According to your experience, it seems that the P5K-SE board has an Attansic
L1 chip which may well not be identical to that on the P5B-E board even
though they appear to be the same to the OS. I note too that Attansic has
been bought out recently which probably accounts for the change of driver
name from Attansic to Atheros.

Since my original post yesterday, I also discovered that the Asus website
added, on 8th October 2007, a beta driver for Atheros L1 controller for the
P5B-E mobo. It may well be that this is the same deadly driver that MS has
on its Update server.

I concur with others that the moral of the story is be careful when
installing hardware drivers. Or as is my foolish motto... do as I say, not
what I do :-)

Poppy.

"Craig Brown" <broca002******.com> wrote in message
news:O38kEOIDIHA.5208@TK2MSFTNGP04.phx.gbl...[color=blue]
> Hi,
>
> I have an ASUS P5K-SE with the Attsanic L1 network controller and the
> driver from Windows Update worked great for me. It was newer than any
> driver available from anywhere else and have been running it for a few
> weeks without problem.
>
> Craig
>
>
> "Poppy" <popybear@optusnet.com.au> wrote in message
> news:CE0ABD48-77AC-41FA-8B6C-A8C3D76D9073@microsoft.com...[color=green]
>> Here is a warning to those with Attansic L1 Gigabit network controller
>> chips on their motherboard, such as ASUS P5N-E.
>>
>> Do NOT, repeat NOT, install the recommended network adapter driver from
>> Microsoft Update. The recommended hardware driver appears with a
>> different manufacturer name, not Attansic. (sorry I can't remember).
>>
>> If you download and install the recommended hardware driver, Vista will
>> no longer boot normally. It hangs while the scrolling bar is on screen.
>> Because other things were downloaded at the same time onto my PC, it took
>> much time and fiddling to figure out the cause. Vista would boot into
>> Safe Mode OK. Control panel revealed nothing amiss. The clue was the
>> failed attempt to boot into Safe Mode with Networking. This suggested
>> that the updated network chip driver was the cause.
>>
>> Removing the driver while in Safe Mode did NOT solve the problem for me
>> because Vista seemed to reload the wrong driver ?from backup, upon
>> attempted normal reboot. Because of the mess I had made to identify the
>> problem, I needed to do a clean install to recover. Downloading and
>> permitting an install of hardware driver from MS Update reproduced the
>> same noboot problem. This time it was possible to recover to a last known
>> good state because I had a very recent good state to go back to.
>>
>> I suggest hiding this particular update if it is recommended for your PC.[/color]
>[/color]