I have a small home LAN consisting of two Win2k machines. I have set up internet connection sharing on both but the client always seems to come up with a dns error when trying to access the connection. When i use ipconfig on both machines that seems to be fine as they are both assigned an ip address by DHCP (169.254.80.192) is the client address. I have uninstalled netbeui as I've heard that causes problems and set the default gateway on the client to the server address but still no luck. The ping command works fine on both and before when i had just a normal network connection with statically assigned addresses that was fine so I know it's not the nic cards. Even when I disable Zone alarm it stil doesn't work. Would a static assignment of ip address work better?

The 169.254.xxx.xxx address is NOT assigned by DHCP, but it is assigned as an internal address which is nnot routable so you can't get to the internet. Try reading this article: http://www.sysopt.com/articles/icsproxy/index.html

If you chose to use IP addressing, then statically set the IP address. They will be able to communicate via automatic IP addressing just fine, but is better from a troubleshooting aspect to have the boxes as static. Maybe 90.0.0.1 for the server and 90.0.0.2 for the workstation with a 255.255.255.0 subnet mask. Can the server box get out over the net? Also, you should only set ICS up on the server box, not the client box as well. This box just simply points to the server in it's configuration--that is all.

The server can get out onto the net but I still can't access with the client even statically assigning 192.168.01/2 to both nic cards...what else can I try?

Both boxes are in the same workgroup? Can you communicate between the two (I am not talking about ping here). Can you share something on one box and have the other box access it? Specifically, can the client box access anything on the server box?

What IP addresses is the client using for DNS (in network properties)? Try setting them to the IP addresses of your ISP name servers

I had this problem Go into zonealarm and theres some stuff on ICS.