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Guest
After my cable company replaced my ancient modem (it was losing packets), my two ethernet cards refused to work as a pair. Either worked alone just fine, but when the second was installed, I'd get a persistent flashing "Network cable unplugged" message, and whatever (hub or cable modem) was connected to the offending NIC would send but not receive. Went crazy for twelve hours! Bouth a new NIC--same problem. Swapped PCI slots--same problem. Uninstalled and reinstalled drivers--same problem. Uninstalled both, then reinstalled just one at a time--the first one would always work, the second would always fail. Checked for viruses, full scan; read 50 other threads on the problem; did everything but format the C: and reinstall XP! Considering that stopped my headlong rush and I went to MS XP only tech support and searched for "Network cable unplugged", and what a surprise! They know about this! It's discussed in some of the broadband networking posts. The problem is with CNet PRO200WL cards and RealTek cards, and they suggest contacting the vendor for updated dirvers. Well the drivers that I installed with the brand new NIC did exactly the same thing as the 4 year old drivers on the old NICs, so I didn't jump through that hoop. AND NOW THE GOOD PART: They also timidly suggested a work-around, locking down the speed on the NIC to 10Mbps. Now when you're accustomed to 100Mbps, 10 sorta sucks, but when you've had 0 Mbps for a couple of days, 10 is great! Here's the trail: start, control panel, network connections, click the offending connection, change settings for this device, configure, advanced, connection type, 10Mbps, OK. OK!