From: John Beckett 

"Thees Peereboom"  wrote in message
news::
> What I didn't mention before is that it came with a NIC
> onboard, which I disabled since I couldn't find drivers for it and
> installed another NIC.

Hmmm. Since you have a strange situation, I will mention an unlikely
scenario. If the operating system has some settings for the old NIC, it may
try to use it to reach some destinations. I'm getting desperate with this
suggestion since it doesn't seem to fit with the various symptoms you
report. However, I have fixed a couple of machines by temporarily enabling
an old NIC and making sure that it had IP settings that were different from
the networks in use (e.g. in your case you might give it 10.1.1.1).

You could investigate the registry under:
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\Interfaces

Since all this started after switching the computer on after three weeks
rest, I wonder if some weird hardware fault in the NIC could be
responsible.

> I will change the IP of WS1 - just wait  No joy, either. Same reactions
> as before - changed it to 192.168.0.27.

Disappointing! Glenn mentioned the possibility of some licensing limit.
That wouldn't be a Windows limit because you're not doing concurrent file
sharing, but I wonder if your proxy has some limit? I can't recall the
device now, but I think I met a firewall or something that remembered what
devices had connected to it (the MAC address??), and would decline more
than a pre-set limit.

> Is there a way of just reinstalling TCP/IP?

I would go with Geo's advice.

John

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