Hi I recently installed eight brand new Win2k machines in a classroom and networked them. Sometimes all eight students need to access the same (small) file on one of the machines at more-or-less the same instant. Five or six people can get to the file but the last two or three get an error message saying "too many connections". They have to wait a few seconds and then when they try again they can open the file. We have TWENTY computers running Win95 in another classroom and never run into this problem! So far I've tried using NetBeui instead of TCP/IP and setting the maximum number of uses to 10 on the folder sharing tab, but no diference. Anyone got any ideas?

Windows 2000 Professional has a limit of 10 concurrent peer filesharing connections. When your student computers connect to the computer hosting the shared file, they may use more than one connection. If these connections remain open, the concurrent limit may be reached even though there aren't actually 10 computers actively connected. At a command prompt on the host machine, type "nbtstat -S" (case sensitive, without the "") to see a list of open connections. This won't solve the problem, but it will let you either confirm or rule out my theory. And we can troubleshoot a solution from there.

Thanks for the advice. It will be another week before I go back to the school, but I will try out your suggestion and let you know the result. Cheers Andy

Went to school and ran tests today. Conected the other seven computers to the main computer slowly one by one - no problems. Ran nbtstat -S on the main computer and each of the seven showed up once with its own IP address and the main computer showed up twice, once with the computer name and once as the logged-on user - no IP address, but with the word "listening" next to them. Next we closed all the open files, then rapidly opened a document over the network on each of the seven PCs. At least, we tried to, but the seventh PC was refused, getting the "too many connections" error. Running nbtstat -S again showed six open connections plus the two entries for the main PC. So if I am reading this correctly the problem is not really to do with there being too many connections (we haven't hit the 10 limit) but something to do with trying to make a lot of connections at roughly the same time. Any ideas? Thanks Andy