Whoops

There I was, struggling for days to get my XP laptop to network to my ME desktop.

The desktop seemed to be fine, TCP/IP diagnositics checked out, but the laptop couldn't ping its loopback address.

Technet said reinstall the network card or, in extreme cases, rebuild the IP stack.
I tried both.
Nothing happened.

So I came back to VDr and searched for network issues.

Several people posted about disabling the firewall.
That can't be it. I've got the same firewall on both machines, and the desktop works OK.
I tried it anyway.
It fixed it.

Whoops.

Is my face red?

Go on, have a laugh at my expense.


BTW, the guilty party was Norton Personal Firewall 2002.

Been there, done that, felt equally silly.

Doesn't the Norton firewall allow you to open a hole for a specific machine-all ports in addition to specific ports? If so, you could keep it running for protection without any problems between your two PCs.

We use Norton PF 2k2 on all the machines at work and I just set each to accept all IP's in the range that we use. Haven't had any problems with it.

I disabled it for testing purposes.

I've now added the NICs to the "trusted zone".

It doesn't stop me feeling silly though.