3mice

Hi everyone, Need your help here. Basically, We run win 2000 on all our machines(eight) in the office. everything has been running on smoothly without any networking changes being made when some time last week this issue cropped up. Each machine has been given assigned its own ip manually. Now, when you try to access another machine on the network eg "MACHINEA" you get the error message "\\MACHINEA is not accessible. The network name cannot be found" Thinking the problem might be with the networking cables, i ping the ip address of MACHINE-A plus all the other machines and the packets of data are recieved indicating the machine are on the network! Next i click on the networking icon on the desktop and choose "Computers Near Me" ( All the machines are on the same workgroup, "Africa" ). I get the error message "Africa is not accessible. The server is not configured for transactions" All the machines under our workgroup " Africa" have been assigned ips in the following range ====== IP Address: 192.168.100.* - where * is a manually assigned number for each machine Subnet Mask 255.255.255.0 Default Getaway 192.168.100.1 ====== note: We are able to browse the internet from any machine which is connected through the LAN All the machines are connected through a central switch Could this be a bug with win2000 or is it a virus. I've installed the latest Service Pack (4) from the microsoft website. I've also run all the known antiviruses (McAffe, Norton, AVG) but no virus has been found. i've even updated all the virus definations but still no results. Someone asked me to check the hosts file found at C:\WINNT\System32\drivers\etc and this was the only uncommented entry: 127.0.0.1 localhost Any help on this from you people. This is really confusing and frustrating!!!! Regards 3Mice