I have a strange problem, I hope someone can help. I'm on a university campus LAN and I tried to configure the XP firewall, but I can't even seem to get to the network settings page necessary to change it. For example, if I simply right-click properties on "My Network Places", nothing happens. If I look at the control panel, the icon for "Network Connections" is missing and when I double-click nothing happens. If I click Internet Options > Connections > Setup, I get this error box pop up: "Error in netshell.dll Missing entry:StartNCW" Please help me! It's driving me mad. :) Cheers, Steve

I would say that you can't retrieve any settings because you're on the university network, not your own network on your machine. You can't have access to their settings. I'm sure they already ahave a firewall installed. To be sure, call them.

You should be able to find netshell.dll in C:\Windows\System32. I have not had this problem myself, but did a search on Google and found the following which may be of interest [see http://groups.msn.com/winXPXchange/xpsolutionspage4.msnw] Network connections not displaying in Network Neighborhood Goto start run type in "cmd" at the prompt type "cd\windows\system32" press enter at prompt type "regsvr32 netman.dll" enter . Then type "regsvr32 netcfgx.dll"enter ok then type "regsvr32 netshell.dll" enter then ok type "exit". Shut down and restart, lo and behold network connections will be back where they should be. Hope this is of some help.

Hi Guys, Thanks for the help. I actually fixed it by downloading a copy of netshell.dll from a website. I then looked more closely at netshell.dll in \windows\system32 and it was 52Kb, whereas the downloaded copy was over 1Mb. Obviously it had got corrupted somehow. I replaced the old file with the new one and it all works now. Cheers, Steve