Network share crashes XP…..

[Dirty Harry 0]

I’ve spent three nights now trying to figure this out, to no avail. Now I’m getting desperate… All and any ideas are welcome!

 

Here’s what happens:

 

I boot the XP machine (on a LAN with 3 PC’s – one XP, one W2K and one W98, see end of post for more tech details), internet works fine, the LAN connection seems working and OK. So, I go to “My Network Places”. I use the wizard to add a network place i.e. one of the hard drives in one of the two other PC’s. Everything rolling along, last the wiz asks if I want to open this place when it finishes. Yes I do, and it opens just fine, I can browse it, close it and reopen it. Good, now I close it, and can go back and open it again. So, I’ve created a icon for a network share…

 

Not quite.

 

When I reboot the XP-PC, the network share I just created is still there. Now if I open it, the window just goes kind of blank and I look at the hourglass. So after 3 minutes I get tired of the hourglass and click the close window box and Explorer crashes, “not responding”, but I can’t close it, not by the end now button that pops up, and not from the Task Manager. This leaves me no other option than to reboot the XP-pc. The W98-PC is still OK and apparently unaffected. The exact same thing happens if I try to create a share (from the XP) on the W2K machine, and it happens every time. I’ve also tried to connect thru the Run command ( //PC/share) but it just clicks OK and disappears. When I try to connect through Win Commander it crashes too and doesn’t let me close down itself either.

 

What the hell can I do about this ? It is a bit like the problem BanditX was posting about a few threads back, but no attempt to solve the problem was posted (except reinstall, the easy way out).

 

H.

 

Setup:

A LAN with 3 PC’s, one XP, one W2K, one W98 connected through a Linksys Cable/DSL router (BEFSR41). Static routing used and all 3 PC’s are members of the same workgroup. All machines can ping each other. XP's firewall not running. The same hardware worked just perfectly before upgrading one W2K PC to XP (fresh install) and the W2K browses the W98 just fine. The only change since then is really installing XP on one PC and that I’ve dumped DHCP (after XP install), and go for static IP’s now.