NetBIOS name caching bogus address on Windows 98 machines

I have been upgrading my network to Windows 2000 and Active Directory services. Two weeks ago, we upgraded two servers now leaving one Windows NT server at a remote office (Renton WA). The Windows 9x clients in that office cannot map any drives to the server in Vancouver that we upgraded. Noone at any other site is having trouble.

When we first did the upgrade, the Domain Controller in Vancouver had two network cards enabled and only one configured. Windows assigned an address 169.x.x.x to the second adapter. We have since disabled that adapter.

Somehow the Win9x clients cached that address for the domain controller. I checked over all of the DNS and WINS servers and the address is not referenced in any of them. When I type nbtstat -R on the client, the address is persistent (it doesn't go away.

So, what I did was renamed HOSTS.SAM as HOSTS and put an entry

10.10.7.2 COLUMBIA-BDC2

into it. This preloaded the correct address, but at some point it changes back to the 169.x.x.x number and they can't access the drives again.

This one really has my head spinning.

The XP clients aren't having any trouble at all (the laptops are Pentium 233's with 64MB ram, so don't make the obvious suggestion :)).

bump

Are you using intelligent switches on your network with Spanning Tree protocol disabled? Have you checked for a bad ARP entry? If it's not hardware, have you tried removing/re-adding the network components? There was also an updated network redirector (vredir.vxd) available from Microsoft.

Mr McGee - I think you've nailed it with the vredir.vxd part.

patweb - take a look Here for what you need and where/how to get it.