During a recent wireless installation I came across some interesting behavior that seems to have quite a few people in the online world baffled, so I thought I would give an explanation.  When deciding which adapter to prefer, Windows networking assigns metrics to each connection based on speed, latency, etc. to determine the best connection. 

With the introduction of Wireless-N and most companies not having upgraded their users’ wired connections to gigabit, the wireless ends up being the preferred connection for any device that supports the N standard as the client will connect at speeds anywhere from 150-300Mbps, whereas their wired connection would be connecting at a max of 100Mbps.  This obviously wouldn’t affect clients connecting at a/b/g speeds or clients having a gigabit wired connection.

I hope this clears things up for anyone who was having problems with this.