Although I'm somewhat hesitant to revive an aging thread, I have to interject that this sounds an awful lot like a situation that I've run into SINCE "UPGRADING" TO WINDOWS 8.1.
I have a number computers, some of which are still running XP, and do builds and setups for friends who ask my assistance. So I've done several installs and updates in the past couple of months. Two of the machines were running Windows 8 for over a year. Another two are new,recently assembled from components. Another was a laptop that a friend purchased new with Windows 8 pre-installed. It took a while for me to realize it, but I was experiencing these random page loading failures, with error messages indicating that it may be DNS-related, on every one that had been updated to 8.1.
These errors occur on Windows 8.1 computers that are hard-wired to my DIR-655 and those connected via WiFi. My remaining XP machines, whether connected via WiFi or cat5 cable, perform flawlessly.
Once I realized what was happening, I started doing searches, and found a frequent bit of advice was to invoke a command line that resets the winsock, then restart the computer. That works great! For a few minutes.
My belief that this issue is directly related to Windows 8.1 was solidified when I built my latest system, one week ago today, using the same motherboard and processor models as one I built last month. (one that has the maddening sporadic internet connection problems outlined in this thread.) I have deliberately held-off applying the 8.1 update on my new machine, and have not had a single instance of this problem.
It may be that there's something in my DIR-655 that needs to be changed, but I will confidently state that Microsoft changed something in the 8.1 networking that has resulted in this fiasco, and they're not even acknowledging that it's a problem for some people.