Oh God, please help, LAN Win2k disaster

[slowman]

Hi - I'm having the worst day ever. I'm running two PCs on a small network Win2k Pro SP4, and one laptop XP Pro with integrated wireless card. I just bought a wireless cable router Belkin F5D7231, and Belkin high speed wireless card F5D7001 for one of the PCs which is my entire life hobby and work machine(!). The new router is fine, with wired connection from one PC, and integrated wireless from the laptop. However, since I installed the driver and card for the Belkin wireless card on my main machine, I had problems. I can't get a connection from this machine now to the network, to the router, to the internet, whether wired via my original onboard adapter, whether through the new wireless card, or wired through my old router (which was always fine). I can't even get localhost pages to open in IE. My Avast and AVG mail scanning modules are warning me that they can't protect IMAP, POP3, SMTP, or any connections. I can't ping the router. I've used static and DHCP IP addresses. I've uninstalled TCP/IP from my machine and re-installed. I've uninstalled and reinstalled the wireless card and software several times. I spent 3 hours on the phone to Belkin and we went through everything but they couldn't help. I can't go back to a working system state because by terrible coincidence, my external backup drive recently went down, and although I now have a new one, I haven't managed to get a system state backup done (I know!). I'm totally stuck. I'm convinced the wireless card software has changed something fundamental in my OS / Registry or something, but I don't know what. Can anyone who knows their 2K stuff take pity on me and help me out? I'd be very, very grateful..

[kato2274]

slow down, and take a deeeeeeep breath.



now take troubleshooting one step at a time.



remove and reinstall your network adapters.
run ipconfig to check your IP address

is it a 169.254.X.X address (if it is you're not reaching your DHCP server)

then see if you can ping the loopback address. if you can then the issue isn't necesarily with the network drivers.

if the loopback pings and you have a valid IP address (same subnet as the others on your network) then try to ping one of the other computers / router and see what happens.

if you can't ping the loopback then look for updated drivers from a computer than can get onto the internet.

everything will be fine. what's the very worst case scenario? a OS reload? that's not really that bad especially since your PC actually boots right now and if needed you could get a good data backup beforehand if you had to.....but I don't think it'll come to that.

take your time . . . . one step at a time, and I'm sure it'll sort out.

[slowman]

Hi Kato2274 - Thanks so much for responding - I'm trying to stay calm - OS reload would be awful (sob) - I've got so many apps and stuff.. anyway, yes I keep getting this 169.254.x.x address on this machine's adapters, but then I change it back to 192.168.1.x. and try to ping router but just times out. My PC has started to go into major slow down mode now, even after several reboots - i think it's ailing badly for some reason but i don't know what it is... OK, i've just run ipconfig, it's come up with 169.254.xx.xxx again - why does it do this? OK i've left that as it is and pinged 127.0.0.1 and got a successful response. What does this tell me though?

[slowman]

I haven't reinstalled the wireless adapter, i'll leave that out of the equation for now. The onboard wired LAN has always been fine up until I installed the drivers and software for the wireless, so if i can get that back up and running, that would be something for a start. I don't really understand why the IP address range for the onboard LAN is being changed though..?

[slowman]

OK, so i've changed the TCP/IP properties for the onboard adapter to static, given the 192.168.1.x address, default gateway, and primary DNS as 192.168.1.1. Checked IPCONFIG again, and this shows up ok. Now I can ping the router successfully - i actually managed to do this earlier at one point. But still I cannot get to the router admin screen over http at the 192.168.1.1 address in IE. But I can from this machine.

[slowman]

svchost is consuming 96-100% of my processor capacity constantly... this has only started happening as part of this whole problem today too.. I just wish I knew why..

[slowman]

OK, I think I have it all sorted now. The root of the problem seems to be that the installation of the router/card did something nasty to McAfee Firewall. Even though the service was disabled during install. I resorted to uninstalling the program, and things have picked up since then. I have use Sygate now instead, and seems fine. Thanks anyway for your help.

[kato2274]

OK, I think I have it all sorted now. The root of the problem seems to be that the installation of the router/card did something nasty to McAfee Firewall. Even though the service was disabled during install. I resorted to uninstalling the program, and things have picked up since then. I have use Sygate now instead, and seems fine. Thanks anyway for your help.

glad to hear it. I tend to stay away from macafee products myself...after one too many of these type of incidents (macafee screwing up something else royally) I'm happy to hear everything is OK now. don't be a stranger.