I am having a problem with my network card on my laptop. When I connect to the network (DHCP) I recieve an IP address and am able to ping that address from my laptop. However when I try to ping anything else on the network I get 100% packet loss. I noticed that in my network settings my LAN connection says "Local Area Connection 4", but it's the only LAN connection there. I've dealt with this before in Win 98 but do not know how to handle this in XP Pro. How can I get rid of the previos 3 "hidden" connections so that it only recognizes my current connection. I tried to remove and reinstall the NIC card, however all that did was add another Local Area Connection. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

1. Rename "LAN Connection #4" to "LAN Connection #1". Or "My LAN Connection". Or anything else you like. At some point prior to creating this connection you or whoever owned that laptop created 4 conections and deleted connections 1 through 3. 2. Disable the XP firewall on the laptop and all other clients and search the network again. The router provides a hardware firewall solution so you don't really need the XP firewall enabled. However if you do make sure you set it up as "Connect to the Internet through a router" so that it will know there's a LAN out there. You'll also have to set up a userid/password account on the laptop and enter that into all the other clients before you can establish file shares with them. Set up the shares on the other clients, add this account to the permissions, and log into this account from any client to access shares on all the others. You can't do this from the default "Administrator" account - though you can set up the laptop to log into your network account on boot. (You should never use the Administrator account, anyway, unless you've screwed up your user account and have to reset your password. Change your account name from "Administrator" to "LavaBoy" or whatever, then create a new Administrator account with admin privileges. Make the password for the backup Administrator account something you won't forget like your mother's maiden name or your favorite brand of toothpaste.)

try running winsockfix for starters (www.eternalisp.com) and if you can't ping your other workstations it doesn't matter whether you setup shares or not nothing will happen when you are pinging the other machines are you attempting to ping by name or by IP?? Make sure there is not a third party firewall that is blocking your ping (normally the windows firewall does not) post back with further information after attempts