Sorry Rick:
I'm finding out that a lot of things are missing in some of the down versions of Win7 and I sometimes mistakenly write with Win7 Pro and Win7 Ultimate in mind. You need to first consider that networking is really all about high availability of network resources so you may find that sleep and hibernate and various power saving things can impact networking and you may have to decide, to what extent you want to be "green" versus have a functioning network. Having said that, there are several places where you can specifically control the power saving options for your network device. Look in device manager, find you network adapter, right click, choose properties and see if there is a power management tab if so uncheck allow blah turn off blah. Also drill down through your power option setting in control panel, change setting, change advanced power setting, see if there is anything in there regarding your adapter, I know mine has some setting for my wireless adapter.
EDIT: By the way, the post that you refer to is mainly to address an issue with accessing a device on the network that doesn't support NTLMv2. There is another way to do the same thing within the Windows Registry but that doesn't sound as if it's your actual problem issue.