Windows Networking Issues

[RebateMonger]

Ah....Nothing like bad network card drivers to make things complicated! Glad you got it fixed.

BTW....would you mind checking to see if there were any errors in the System or Application Event Logs about this problem? You'd think that a bad network driver might show errors, probably in the System Event Log, on the computer with the bad driver.

For future reference, I found a LOT of people find the following page useful for solving this (common) networking problem.

Troubleshooting a Peer to Peer Network

 

[jlinker]

The only thing I could find that would come around would be when I did something my network card didn't like, and caused a BSOD with nvnrm.sys.

If I were to change any of the settings on it, other than using Windows to manually install drivers, it'd BSOD.

I finally had to go into safe mode w/out networking, use the Nvidia uninstaller, Driver Cleaner Pro, and then manually delete the last *sys file that was causing problems. Afterwards, I rebooted, ignored the new hardware found prompts, and installed the Nforce 5.10 drivers as opposed to the 5.11 for the Nforce 3 chipset.

I read through that site during my searches for a fix (found by the almighty Google), and it was pretty helpful.

 

[RebateMonger]

It's amazing how much damage bad network, sound, and video card drivers can do.

Windows 98 had defective built-in drivers for Realtek-based NICs. What a mess! The PC would randomly freeze. It could just be sitting there, doing nothing, and it would freeze. You'd never guess it was a NIC driver problem.

A few years ago, NVidia shipped a new (non-WHQL) driver for its video cards. The driver worked fine, UNLESS you were using FrontPage to publish web sites. Menu Buttons would get totally screwed up on the web site. You'd never think that a video card could mess up the CREATION of web pages, which were being loaded and served by a completely different PC.

 

[jlinker]

Originally posted by: RebateMonger
It's amazing how much damage bad network, sound, and video card drivers can do.

Windows 98 had defective built-in drivers for Realtek-based NICs. What a mess! The PC would randomly freeze. It could just be sitting there, doing nothing, and it would freeze. You'd never guess it was a NIC driver problem.

A few years ago, NVidia shipped a new (non-WHQL) driver for its video cards. The driver worked fine, UNLESS you were using FrontPage to publish web sites. Menu Buttons would get totally screwed up on the web site. You'd never think that a video card could mess up the CREATION of web pages, which were being loaded and served by a completely different PC.

Yeah, I know the feeling.

My old P4-ready motherboard had a Realtek NIC on it, and I installed the "latest" drivers available. I suddenly experienced massive spikes in latency, frequent packet loss, and under 10kb/sec downloads with the 5mbps (advertised) cable that we had at our house.

I started reading around, and apparently wasn't the only one with a problem. I uninstalled those drivers and reverted a version back, and everything suddenly disappeared.

I can hold my own under most networking instances, but some things just frustrate the living *obscenity* out of me. :-/