Steam Download Service causing ASUS PCE-N15 11n Wireless Network Adapter to crash

[MountainDude]

Hello Community!

I recently found and solved an edge case, networking problem that I thought I'd share in the hopes of helping others.

Relevant Hardware information:

OS: Windows 7 64-bit
Network Adapter: ASUS PCE-N15 11n Wireless Network Adapter

Problem specifics:

When starting or restarting an in progress download of DOTA 2, connection speeds would increase normally, up to a regular rate. After 30 seconds to 2 minutes connection speeds would drop quickly over 30 seconds to 2 minutes, until reaching zero. The connection would not recover even when given a lot of time. After this occurred websites would not load, trace route and ping plotter show ~70% packet loss to any target.

Solutions:

I found that disabling and re-enabling the wireless adapter would reinstate internet connectivity. After checking my modem, router and wifi adapter's firmwares and drivers, I found them all to be up-to-date. I was able to work around the problem by reverting my wireless adapters driver from version 1.0.0.8 to 1.0.0.7 (version numbers are from ASUS website, if you are looking at the driver specifics then I reverted from 1005.31.1222.2011 to 1005.22.615.2011)

**THIS ISN'T A PERMANENT SOLUTION - You should always have up-to-date drivers but until either an ASUS patch or a Steam patch resolves this...
**DON'T TRY AT HOME - You should only attempt this fix if you are confident in your ability to do these things and confident that if something goes wrong, you can fix it.

[_I_]

are you using the driver from windows update?
or the driver from asus?

[MountainDude]

Windows update will find the latest ASUS Driver available and install it.

[Pwntato]

How would I go about downgrading the NIC drivers if my computer came with 10.0.0.8 installed on it?
I have the .7 driver downloaded from Asus but whenever I uninstall the driver and reboot it installs the .8 that came on the computer :/