I spent far more time than I’d like to admit in troubleshooting this issue so I figured I’d at least blog it.

Symptoms: When you run the “network connection test” on the Xbox it consistently succeeds. When you try to connect to Xbox Live, either to sign in with your profile or do a “Recover Gamertag,” it fails and tells you to go run the network connection test.

Let me tell you how frustrating this behavior is. The connection test says fine, but when you try to connect it says it can’t - go run the test?!

My network is set up right now so I have my wireless router downstairs feeding a wireless bridge (DAP-1522) upstairs in the game room. The Xbox is connected through the bridge. Everything was working wonderfully until around two weeks ago. Nothing changed on the network to my knowledge, no configuration changes or devices added/removed. Just… magic. Things are failing.

The first thing I did was disconnect the wired connection to the bridge and connect using the Xbox onboard wireless adapter. Same symptoms, only this time I could occasionally connect to Xbox Live if I tried signing in five or six times in a row. Not a lot of progress, but progress.

I rebooted and reset every network device I own with no luck.

I contacted Xbox Support via email and they directed me to this page about troubleshooting connection issues. None of the items here helped, but it’s understandable - there’s no way they could have guessed what was wrong.

The breakthrough came when I powered down the bridge and then connected to Xbox Live via wireless. Instant success. Something about that wireless bridge was interfering hardcore with the rest of the wireless network.

I ended up resetting the DAP-1522 bridge to factory defaults, doing a firmware upgrade (not sure if that was necessary, but there was a minor-version update available, so I figured why not), and reconfiguring the whole thing from scratch.

The Xbox is connected through the bridge once more, but now it signs in correctly.

This isn’t the first time that DAP-1522 has given me grief. When I was using it as an access point rather than a bridge it also had a couple of times where I had to reset it to factory defaults and start over. Like running for an extended period of time causes some sort of “buildup” that has to be flushed out. I may have to replace it with something more reliable.