I thought this issue was like another person here, and that downloading the nvidia chipset drivers was the solution. However that is not all that is going on.

This machine had Vista 64bit and is now Win7. Same issue with both.

I have explicitly been denying network driver updates since getting things working again and when a Windows updates occurs on seemingly benign Office updates the adapter fails to work.

Is the update process somehow protecting this machine by turning off things and it fails to recover connectivity after a restart?

All that seems to ever work is a system restore. Which does work.

Since there are 25 pending updates asking to do there thing, I hate to think this is a one by one update test to find the culprit. Any ideas?

This has an integrated nic, video, and I guess audio on the motherboard. ES5200 intel cpu on a gateway 4800-05e I am not quite sure how to determine the actual network adapter. This is a wired adapter. I suppose worst case I can try another adapter if this keeps happening.