Reposting this problem to see if anyone can offer advice - thanks! We 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". After getting some advice I ran the following tests: Connected the other seven computers to the main computer slowly one by one (I mean I opened a file on the main computer over the netowrk)- no problems. Ran nbtstat -S on the main computer and each of the seven others 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. Anyone hit this problem before or got any ideas how to overcome it?

very interesting. Haven't run into this one. Have you tried disabling the license logging service? It is a fix for a number of license errors/bugs

Thanks for the suggestion, but I did a quick search and all links pointed me at pages relating to Win2k Server, whereas I am using bog-standard Professional on all the eight machines. Am I missing something?

There I go again thinking servers when I should be thinking workstation. There is no license loggin service on pro. Sorry about that. Shares setup with no restrictions? Otherwise I am out of ideas.

the only thing i can think of is that you are bottlenecking due to the slow data transfer rate on a peer to peer network. you may just want to use a server instead of using a work station. i found that if i am on a computer that is used for the host computer and am doing something that is making the computer process lots of data, the rest of the computers on the network can not access because the host is working on something else. what type of cable are you using? CAT5 is slow, if you move up to a faster cable this might help. just a thought without knowing the details of the entire system and network. vizwiz viz master