XP Home kills network

[Guest]

I had two machines, a notebook running XP Pro and a desktop running Windows
2000. They were networked using a crossover cable, with the Win2k machine
sharing its internet connection and thus acting as a DHCP server. The XP Pro
machine happily received an IP address from the Win2k machine, and it all
worked perfectly.
Then I installed Windows XP Home on the Windows 2000 PC, setting it up in a
dual-boot configuration with the former Windows 2000. I set up the Internet
connection, and shared it as before. So far so good.
The problem is that in this guise I just can not get the two machines to
network at all. The XP Pro machine cannot obtain an IP address from the XP
Home machine. Even using static IP addressing on both sides, the network will
not work. Neither machine can ping the other.
I have tried everything I can think of. If I reboot the XP Home machine into
the alternative Windows 2000 configuration, it networks perfectly.
Thus there is no hardware issue (I have tried another network card and
drivers) and no connectivity issue the problem lies with XP Home.
If anybody can help Id be grateful to learn something!
e-mail (e-mail address removed) with any suggestions.

 

[Chuck]

I had two machines, a notebook running XP Pro and a desktop running Windows
2000. They were networked using a crossover cable, with the Win2k machine
sharing its internet connection and thus acting as a DHCP server. The XP Pro
machine happily received an IP address from the Win2k machine, and it all
worked perfectly.
Then I installed Windows XP Home on the Windows 2000 PC, setting it up in a
dual-boot configuration with the former Windows 2000. I set up the Internet
connection, and shared it as before. So far so good.
The problem is that in this guise I just can not get the two machines to
network at all. The XP Pro machine cannot obtain an IP address from the XP
Home machine. Even using static IP addressing on both sides, the network will
not work. Neither machine can ping the other.
I have tried everything I can think of. If I reboot the XP Home machine into
the alternative Windows 2000 configuration, it networks perfectly.
Thus there is no hardware issue (I have tried another network card and
drivers) and no connectivity issue the problem lies with XP Home.
If anybody can help Id be grateful to learn something!
e-mail (e-mail address removed) with any suggestions.

What SP level is the XP Home computer running?

On the XP Home computer, did you enable the Guest account, using Start - Run -
"cmd" - type "net user guest /active:yes" in the command window?

Any firewalls on either XP computer?

Please provide ipconfig information for each computer, lets see why the two
computers can't ping each other.
Start - Run - "cmd". Type "ipconfig /all >c:\ipconfig.txt" into the command
window - Open c:\ipconfig.txt in Notepad, copy and paste into your next post.

Cheers,
Chuck
Paranoia comes from experience - and is not necessarily a bad thing.

 

[Guest]

I have set up networks like this a hundred times without any issues - the
only difference here is that the XP Home came with SP2. There are no
firewalls enabled on either machine.
Surely the guest account status on the ICS machine should have no impact on
whether other networked machines can access the internet or be accessed over
the network?

 

[Chuck]

I have set up networks like this a hundred times without any issues - the
only difference here is that the XP Home came with SP2. There are no
firewalls enabled on either machine.
Surely the guest account status on the ICS machine should have no impact on
whether other networked machines can access the internet or be accessed over
the network?

You're right - in your case, the problem is lower level. If you have setup
networks like this hundreds of times, you know how to setup fixed ip LANs. If
both computers, with manually assigned ip, can't ping each other, the problem is
either hardware, network drivers, or the firewall.

If it's not a hardware problem, and there's no firewall, then the answer must
lie with the network drivers. Some network drivers are not SP2 compliant. :-{

Your case is not unique. You have to get SP2 compliant network drivers from the
vendor.

Cheers,
Chuck
Paranoia comes from experience - and is not necessarily a bad thing.

 

[Guest]

Seems like SP2 breaks more things than it fixes! Strangely, I tried a
completely different brand of network card, with the same results. In both
cases the network card drivers were XP-supplied, the card was detected by
plug-and-play and drivers from Microsoft were installed. (???) When I check
the details of the network connection, even after some time, both the
'Packets sent' and the 'Packets received' are at zero - Surely an ICS machine
should broadcast packets occasionally under any circumstances? Could TCP/IP
protocol be broken?