This is a real mystery that has me stumped. We've got some windows 8.1 laptops here that were working fine at first but have stopped getting an IP address on their LAN connections.
We've tried all the usual stuff - remove the NIC in device manager and rediscover it, updated drivers and BIOS, disabled the Kaspersky AV software and so on and so forth. Even with a static address in the right subnet it couldn't ping anything else, and we've ruled out cabling and switch ports as they are known good and work fine with other machines. Safe mode with networking makes no difference.
We initially suspected a hardware fault which I've seen before with the same symptoms (these were bought as part of a batch) so got parts replaced under warranty which fixed it on two PCs but it's now happened on another 8.1 machine bought separately (though same model - a Dell E5530) and has reoccured on one of them.
I've just popped a new HD in and done a clean install of windows which is working fine so that rules out hardware, but clearly I need to get to the bottom of it and can't reinstall the OS each time it happens.
Has anyone seen this before?