Hello
We are quite a lot of users currently suffering from so-called "connections dropouts" with Intel WiFi adapters and recent drivers.
There are a lot of posts related to this issues in numerous forums, including Intel's. I did not read all of them, and I am pretty sure that everything I will write in this post has been reported somewhere else, but I did not find anything synthetic, so I am doing it.
Intel said they are aware of the problem, that is caused by data reordering and that it is solved with this new set of drivers:
Intel Wi-Fi Products ; TechNote: Sporadic wireless disconnects caused by data reordering issue
In fact, I downloaded said drivers for Windows 7 x64 and I still have the issue with my Centrino 6205-N adapter in an HP Elitebook 8560w.
The issue is then NOT solved, as far as I can tell.
Actually, from the adapter point of view, the connection does not drop out, but the speed goes down to 1Mbps and occasionally increases to 2Mbps (geee!)
For all of you who seem to be willing to check what adapter settings can potentially solve the issue, there is only one:
disable 802.11n.
Your speed will then be 54Mbps or less. No 802.11n, no 300Mbps anymore. But that is better than 1Mbps
You may think that another setting change did solve the issue, but this is a side effect: If said setting change is such that the adapter is reinitialized, then the conditions that caused the issue are "cleared" (since the adapter is reinitialized, data and structures used by the drivers are reinitialized too, etc.). The conditions have to be met again for the issue to reoccur. And they will. And once these conditions are met, the issue is there and there is nothing much you can do but reinitializing the adapter (disabling it and re-enabling it has the same effect).
Another solution seems to be to switch back to previous versions of the driver (14.x). If these drivers are installed on your Windows machine, perform a manual driver update and select them.
I also noticed that when running a packet sniffer on my laptop (wireshark or network monitor) and capturing the frames, the issue seems not to happen (timing conditions do change then, especially from the driver's point of view).
Last but not the least: this does not seem to happen with all access points. For me, it happens with a netgear AP (CG3700B, in which WMM has to be enabled for 802.11n to be active. Could it be somewhat related to the issue?); but at work where they use something else, I don't have noticed any connection dropout (when I remember that I can enable 802.11n there...).
I really hope that Intel can solve this issue or, at least, provide an official workaround to solve it (such as using drivers v14.x only!) instead of pretending it is solved when it is not.
If needed, I volunteer to help. I can record network traces and, as a former technical lead involved in kernel driver development, I could even run debugging tools (at least DbgView, maybe with checked versions of the drivers).