I administer a small church network of about 5 PCs all running WIndows XP Home SR2 on and ADSL broadband internet connection. The network is split across 2 buildings as follows: The ADSL connection is brought into the main building where it feeds 3 computers via a D-LINK ADSL router. The 4th port on the router is connected via CAT5 to the second building where the incoming cable is connected to a 3COM 3CRWE51196 Wireless Cable Router. The Incoming ADSL router is on address 192.168.1.3 and the 3Com on 192.168.1.2. If I use fixed IP addresses with the Default Gateway set to 192.168.1.3 all works well and computers in the remote building can access the network and internet. My problem is that one of the PCs in the remote building is a laptop which needs to have Auto IP address allocation for use with a home cable modem. If I set the IP address to Auto then it is allocated a default gateway of 192.168.1.2 (the 3Com) rather than 192.168.1.3 (the DLink ADSL router). I cannot find a way to diasble the Cable router in the 3Com (and I need the wireless part of it so can't change it for a simple switch) Can anyone help me resolve this so the Laptop can use automatic IP address/Gateway alloaction? Thanks Cliff J McLoughlin

If I understand you correctly, you want the laptop to get its IP settings (specifically, the gateway address) from the DLink router. That should be fairly easy to do. Just disable DHCP on the 3Com router. Then the DLink will be the only DHCP server on your network and will handle all DHCP requests from the laptop or any other computer. You don't need to worry about disabling the 3Com's router functionality. No routing actually takes place between devices connected to its LAN ports.