Hi Rabbit B - you're not with AOL are you? I've been experiencing this for some weeks now, as have others on the AOL message boards. Some have contacted AOL who give various bits of advice which don't seem to work, or blame BT, but I don't know if this is an AOL problem or a BT one.
When it first happened, I had to switch off at the sockets, counted to 30 and switched on again, this seemed to work better than just rebooting the computer. Now, 9 times out of 10 it will reconnect itself automatically at the 1st, 2nd or 3rd try.
Judith