I just finally worked through an "experience" with my two computers, a cable modem, and a gateway router. All was working quite well last week until I shut down and powered off and unplugged EVERYTHING (power, cable connection, and phone) to avoid problems should a thunderstorm strike. Alas, when I powered up, my Win XP computer (a Soyo Dragon plus system with 640MB DDR RAM) reported that "network cable unplugged." It obviously wasn't. New cable didn't make any difference, and no other combination did, either. But if I unplugged the ethernet cable from the router and plugged directly into the cable modem, viola, no error message and everything worked normally! All the while (when the cable modem (Com21 Doxport 1010) was plugged into the router) my Win 98 machine (Shuttle HOT 569a with 256 MB SDRAM) continued to work through the router (Netgear RT314). Rebooting any combination of computer, router, or cable modem had no effect. The Win XP machine was determined that it had no connection to the router, and the link LED on the port glowed amber in confirmation. Changing the driver or uninstalling/reinstalling the driver had no effect. The Netgear router is accessable by FTP to HTTP, but not from a computer that's convinced that there is no connection. So I tried reaccessing the configuration utility via http from the Win 98 computer, which I was able to do, but that had no effect. I finally resolved the issue when I accessed the router via FTP and overwrote the configuration file with a blank configuration file (downloaded from Netgear), then redid the configuration via the http utility. Now everything works again. I'd greatly appreciate a Knowlege base article on this subject.

Bernard, I tried to run 2 cable modems at a friends house and had similar problems with xp. It's almost as if xp doesn't like to be on a same cable line as any other machine. As for anything else I'm still at a loss as you are. Bart

The same thing happened to me when i had the cable plugged into the wrong place in the router. Try a different slot in the router.