Routing in ad hoc networks is a challenging problem because nodes are mobile and links are continuously being created and broken. Existing on-demand ad hoc routing algorithms initiate route discovery only after a path breaks, incurring a significant cost in detecting the disconnection and establishing a new route. In this work, we investigate adding proactive route selection and maintenance to on-demand ad hoc routing algorithms. More specifically, when a path is likely to be broken, a warning is sent to the source indicating the likelihood of a disconnection. The source can then initiate path discovery early, potentially avoiding the disconnection altogether. A path is considered likely to break when the received packet power becomes close to the minimum detectable power (other approaches are possible). Care must be taken to avoid initiating false route warnings due to fluctuations in received power caused by fading, multipath effects and similar random transient phenomena. Experiments demonstrate that adding proactive route selection and maintenance to DSR and AODV (on-demand ad hoc routing protocols) significantly reduces the number of broken paths, with a small increase in protocol overhead. Packet latency and jitter go down in most cases. Because preemptive routing reduces the number of broken paths, it also has a secondary effect on TCP performance-unnecessary congestion handling measures are avoided. This is observed for TCP traffic under different traffic patterns (telnet, ftp and http). Additionally, we outline some problems in TCP performance in ad hoc environments.