Hi, I have 4 pc's networked with a netgear WGT624. the 4 pc's are wired, and all but 1 work perfect. the problem pc can ping all the others but none can ping the problem pc. (for the record I dont know what it means what i did, but followed c.net's instructions on pinging with no problem) the problem pc can however access the net no problem, and also access the router. many attempts at the network wizard failed, so I thought I'd try and see if wireless helped. So I took out the network cable and installed the netgears wireless dongle. No problems at all, have net access and router access, but still no access to any other pc (other pc's cannot access it either). I do keep getting the connection error with the no servers available. I have searched all through c.net and have tried.... services.msc and disabled web client (didnt work, so restored it) switched off/disconnected everything for half hour, set it all back up (nada). I'm quite good with pc's my network has been trouble free for years, well I'll rephrase by saying I have figured out all problems so far lol. Now I know I don't know what I'm talking about but I am pretty certain that there is something in the services.msc that is either faulty disabled or whatever that's causing this. I cannot even try to fault find because I don't know "what" has to be on or running to make it all work, so is there a basic list someone can give me in there that i can check to see if they're correct? many thanks for reading.

Ok, minor update... Somehow, I have managed to fix something, and I can now do this pinging all over the place lol. All the pc's can ping eachother, and I believe it was because I did the "allow netbios over tcp". It doesn't however allow me join my network, so I'm still bugged there.

Ok, now it gets wierd. I had to reboot, and it took about 4-5 reboots to regain net access. this same thing happened when connected using 2 different ethernet cards. So I purpously rebooted to bring up the same "non-connection" problem BUT, I found I could still do the pinging things with success. still no access to net or network, but pinging's ok. I could also still access the router. I am now thinking this no longer a networking problem, but an operation system problem, and shall take this to the xp forum. I'll still come to this post to try any ideas.

Try this simple file sharing and see whether it works, if not then take a look on this winsockfix in case you have faulty winsock. Hope it helps.