It seems like the Thunderbolt is crashing, as any peripheral on the Thunderbolt bus stops working, with exception of the Display itself, which I guess is not really Thunderbolt, but rather Displayport. But things like the sound, mic, ethernet, USB ports, and extra Thunderbolt port on the back of the Cinema display stops working.
The USB ports on the rMBP itself continue to work though. My mid-2012 rMBP doesn't have an ethernet port on the laptop itself, I have to go through the Cinema display for wired internet, which stops working under these circumstances, so I have to revert to WiFi, or reboot the machine.
Oddly enough, I only see an error message for the Ethernet port in the Windows Event Log when this happens, but nothing else, even if I have a keyboard and mouse hanging of the Cinema display's USB ports, as well as sound usually coming from the monitor rather than the laptop itself. I'm not sure I have been playing any sound when the issue occurs, and I guess USB it designed to disconnect at any time, so it might not show up as odd/failing events.
The details for the Ethernet failure is the following:
Level: Error
Event ID: 10317
Source: NDIS
Task Category: PnP
General:
Miniport Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet, {82f3352f-29c2-4be1-a09f-a8e0261f01db}, had event Fatal error: The miniport has detected an internal error
Details:
| [ Name] | Microsoft-Windows-NDIS |
| [ Guid] | {CDEAD503-17F5-4A3E-B7AE-DF8CC2902EB9} |
|
| Keywords | 0x2000000000004016 |
|
| [ SystemTime] | 2016-01-08T00:17:11.442913300Z |
|
| [ ActivityID] | {82F3352F-29C2-4BE1-A09F-A8E0261F01DB} |
|
| IfGuid | {82F3352F-29C2-4BE1-A09F-A8E0261F01DB} |
| AdapterName | Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet |
