I am now running on Win98 SE, and using ICS. It wasn't easy, but here is how I did it . . .

I opted for the upgrade vs full install -- so for all you guys who did do formats, this may not work.

As I said above, I did the upgrade, so I was left with all my old software i.e. wingate 3.01. After the initial upgrade, wingate seemed to be causing problems with ICS. I did an uninstall, but that didn't seem to fix the problem. I figured the problem must be in my network configuration.

I have Cogent 6911/tx 10/100 networking cards. Cogent was bought out by Adaptec, who produced the same card for some time, and therefore supports it. Naturally, I have every version of the drivers released for this card, but I found that 98 SE's drivers (for an intel 21140 based card) worked better than those supplied by Adaptec. LESSON #1 -- if Microsoft has the driver for your hardware, use that driver when you have problems.

There were a few more problems with my network config. I use(d) static I/P addresses. No particular reason, I just like knowing which PC has what i/p address. I cant get this to work with ICS. There is probably something I am overlooking, but I cant seem to find what.

On my client PC's, I have tcp/ip configured to use DHCP for WINS resolution. They are all configured to obtain i/p addresses automatically, and have dns disabled. I dont understand how ICS works with these settings, but it does. (but that is not all it took go sort things out) LESSON #2 -- let windows use it's defaults EVERYWHERE. It will do most things automatically.

Uninstall ICS on your host machine until you have EVERYTHING else on your machine working properly. After that, install ICS. It will assign a static i/p address of 192.168.0.1 and a Subnet of 255.255.255.0 to your host machine. Everything else will remain set as default.

note: I don't know if this is relevant or not, but every time I unsuccessfully installed ICS, my dial adapter (device to share) was prefixed with #1 but my network adaptor (device to share with) wasn't. When I finally got ICS to work, the dial up adapter was #1, and my network card was #2. Maybe this is not relevant, but in the help, the adapters listed are numbered, so if yours aren't, you may have a problem.

After installing and messing around for several hours, I did some registry work. hkey_local_machine\enum is a good one to delete. It will clear out all the information about your hardware, and bring windows back to the "detect hardware" state. This is useful if you add and remove a lot of hardware, and want to "clean up" your registry. This will also eliminate any custom driver settings, which can sometimes cause problems. I also deleted a lot of hardware related descriptions from the hkey_local_machine\system\currentcontrolset\servic es section. as always, backup your registry before doing anything screwey to it.