I had a similiar issue to where the Captive Portal would display some of the time and I would get the generic browser error page at other times. Long story short, the Captive Portal interface has a config setting for a threshold as to the number of attempts an IP can make to it within a certain period of time. For me, it was 1 request every 2 seconds. We upped this to something like 3 requests every second and the problem went away. The problem in my case was that when a system came on the network and the user begins typing in their search parameter in the browser bar, the browser would perform a kind of prefetch function for the content as they typed it in. These requests were being sent to the CP and causing it to hit its threshhold. Sebsequently, by the time the user presses enter, they would get the generic browser error page about the resource not being able to be reached instead of the CP due to the CP dropping the request. Hope this helps...someone.
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