A couple of machines on my network can't access the printer from time to time. Together with the rest of the network, they can access the email and all other network resources just fine. I also can't ping these two machines from the DNS server even though they can access other network resources. qwerty

Not much to go on, but I would check the switch they are hooked to. Could be bad ports, especially if the problem is intermittent. Larry Coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from great personal success, or just an all-night drive, we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen. -

If they work at all then ping was not a good test. Ping is a poor test in most cases. You do need more info. Is the printer an ip based stand alone? Is it a shared resource? Are you on a domain? How many switches and routers do you have? Any netbios name issues. Are all machines on the correct time? How about lease times and number of lease ip's? Are the machines on APIPA? Did you use any tools like nslookup or ntstat or arp or tracrt? "Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, antivirus, anti-spyware, Live CD's, backups, are in my top 10