Here's the scenario. We have two laptops, and a cable modem which only has one LAN jack. So obviously only one laptop can use the net at a time. But then I thought maybe I could plug the LAN into my laptop, and my flatmate would then be able to share it using the wireless, which is built into both of our laptops, and sure enough, Windows Vista offers the tools to do this (adhoc network) But we couldn't get it working, and came to the conclusion that it may be my PC, so we plugged the LAN jack into my flatmate's laptop - only to find that he can't get the net at all. It just shows as "Local only" on the network status rather than "local and internet" So it must have been his laptop being the problem, as it can't get on the net even with the LAN cable connected directly. We have tried everything - uninstalled firewall, and then, somewhat drastically, ran a recovery which imaged Vista back to his hard drive at the factory settings - and STILL it doesn't pick up the net! Whereas my laptop - you plug it in, and it works, no questions asked. What could be causing this? I do notice that when running an IPCONFIG on his machine, there are some entries for IPv6 and a load of "tunnel" entries too, or something. It doesn't look right to me, and they are not there on my configuration. But I just can't understand why it wouldn't work even after wiping the damn thing! Any ideas? Many thanks

"so we plugged the LAN jack into my flatmate's laptop" when you did this did you shutdown the laptop, unplug power from the cable modem...count to 10, then power up the cable modem, then boot up his laptop...!!! sometimes the ISP needs to reset the mac from the identified system attached to the modem before allowing an ip... good luck

You were right. So that's that sorted. But that doesn't explain why we can't connect to the net via ad-hoc in this scenario. Any ideas? Thanks

try using this: http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Wi... MAKE SURE YOU READ THE NOTES..!! Good Luck