Hey, thanks for your responses! I'm really surprised so many people on the internet are willing to take time out to help strangers. That said, here's the full story on my network. We have four XP machines and a hub. The uplink on the hub is a cable modem with AT&T@home service. Originally we entered specific IP/GW/DNS information into our TCP/IP configuration, and everything worked great. We were all on the same gateway; we could see eachother over windows networking; TCP/IP gaming was fast. Then, a couple weeks ago, the cable ISP installed a DHCP server. We could no longer assign ourselves IPs/GWs, we HAD to go through the DHCP server. (obtain IP addresses automatically). The problem is that the DHCP server assigns us IPs that are "far away" from eachother. The third number in our IP addresses are different, (not just the fourth). Thus, IP to IP operations are VERY slow. (the internet service is slow to begin with.) Worse, we are assigned different gateways, so we can't see eachother on the network for file/printer sharing. (I think I'm right to say that you need to be on the same gateway normally to "see" eachother on the network.) 1. It seems like the hub should be smart enough not to send network traffic through the uplink when it is destined to come back down again. 2. It seems like the hub SHOULD allow us all to see eachother, even if our TCP/IP configurations are different. I hope this is enough information. Please let me know anything else you need to help me out. So, short of creating a residential gateway, what can I do? If I create a residential gateway, (by buying an expensive router or routing through a computer), how will things like simultaneous online gaming and FTP servers operate? (I ask because it is my understanding that the rest of the internet sees all computers under the router as coming from the IP of the router, so I can't imagine what would happen if we were each running a game server). Thanks a zillion, Akash Kumar

(I ask because it is my understanding that the rest of the internet sees all computers under the router as coming from the IP of the router, so I can't imagine what would happen if we were each running a game server). Yes, you are right. But if you can run these server in different port then firewall do the port forwarding the specific server. If you have one old pc sitting, take a look at freesco.org Runing windows without firewall btw internet is a nightmare.

You will have to create a gateway of your own and use that to assign IP Addresses now. It's not that bad and not really that expensive. A 4-port firewall/router costs $80 - $100 and a hub to add more ports costs another $50 or so. Setting up one of your PCs as a gateway is possible and only requires a 2nd NIC, your hub, and Internet Connection Sharing to be installed. It's a little less secure than a firewall/router, however. When the DHCP server on your gateway sends your gaming packets into the internet it includes a secondary address for the machine on the LAN the packet originally came from. When the remote server responds it includes that secondary address so your gateway knows which machine to route the replies to. So having your own gateway doesn't affect your games at all: We connect to multiple games on the Internet and never have a problem.

I'm not familiar with XP but I can shed some light on the networking portion of your problem. Statement #1 is incorrect. A hub is not smart at all. It forwards all traffic regardless of the IP address. Some hubs will store MAC address and then only forward to the correct ports but this will not help your situation. #2 It is your computers that are not allowing you to see each other or I should say that TCP/IP running on each computer will drop packets that do not belong to the network number assigned to that station. Even computers directly connected with different network numbers will not be able to see each other. This however is not decided by how far apart the numbers are it is decided by the subnet mask which is what tells your computer what part of the number is network id and what is your computer's id. If you decide to use a server running NAT (Network Address Translation) to solve your problems you will not have the trouble you mentioned because although the world outside of your NAT server will only see 1 address the NAT server will keep all of your different computers separate by giving them a separate port number. You might try adding NetBEUI protocol to your LAN connection and see if that does not allow your File and Prints sharing to resume. NetBEUI is not routable so it will stay confined on your side of your providers router, it will however pass through your hub with no problems and no configuration. As Orion stated above the price for home network routers has really come down so that is a good choice. You can see how far apart you actually are by going to a command prompt and typing: Tracert ipaddress where ipaddress is the address of one of the other computers in your group, you will be able to count the number of hops as well as get the names of the routers you have to go through to get to each other (if you can at all). As for your first statement I have received a lot of help from this site in the past and check in from time to time both with questions and answers. Hope this helps, Lawish