Vista - Home network has stopped functioning

There might be posts like this in this newsgroup already, but I
couldn't come up with search terms that would narrow it down in any
reasonable fashion, so sorry if this is a common posting...

I'm running an Acer Aspire 9300 laptop with Vista Home Premium and a
PC tower with XP Home Edition. These are talking to each other and the
Internet over a Linksys Wireless G broadband router WRT54G. Until last
week, I was using Norton firewall and anti-virus 2006. The
subscription expired early October, and I took the opportunity to try
something different and installed Trend Micro Internet Security 2008.

I bought the laptop in February and set up the connection. The two
computers have talked to each other wonderfully up until roughly early
October. At some point the Vista laptop suddenly stopped being able to
show directory listings for the XP tower, although it would still show
the actual computer in the Network location on the Explorer. It would
also show the XP folders I've marked as being shared, but whenever I
would click on any shared folders, it would return an error message
saying the resource isn't available. I have a shortcut to a specific
folder on my XP tower in my Vista Explorer because I manually back up
some files to there from the laptop a couple of times a week. The
shortcut has worked flawlessly for months, but it also has suddenly
started giving me this error as well. I let my Norton subscription
lapse and eventually bought Trend Micro on November 3rd in order to
give that a try. Now when I go to the Network screen on the Vista
laptop, I don't even see the XP tower shown at all. I've tried to
click on the above-mentioned shortcut, but I still get the same error,
of course. If it can't see the tower at all, then it certainly isn't
going to be able to see a folder on the tower.

Both computers can use the Internet without a problem, which means
that they both can talk to the wireless router that they share, but
they seem to have slowly lost connection to the ability to see each
other, first in terms of folders, then in terms of the actual
computers. I believe that I had done some driver updating on the
laptop at roughly the same time as this problem started to rear its
ugly head, but I don't know if it corresponds exactly, since there was
a period where I didn't use either mach much for about a month.

I had installed Linksys's Easy Link Advisor on my tower back when I
had first bought the router. I looked at that yesterday and it shows
both the tower and the laptop as being active at the same time, so
apparently *something* is able to see both computers, even if either
Windows is telling me that each respective computer is alone in its
own universe. I've looked at everything I can think of on both
machines, but I can't get them to see each other. The thing is that I
have no real experience in setting up networks of any kind, so I'm
probably missing something simple. I may just not know where to look.

The strange thing is that I hadn't changed any settings since I got
the network up and running in February, but suddenly the laptop
wouldn't reference the tower's folders but it could see the tower,
then it couldn't see the tower at all. If I had been playing with
settings, I could see this happening, but once I got it working, I
left it alone.

Any suggestions as to where to look or what to check would be greatly
appreciated. Thanks for any help...

On both computers, run clean boot. Can you access XP now?

How to run Windows OS with a clean ...Post new topic Reply to topic,
chicagotech.net Forum Index -> Windows ... With MSCONFIG, you also can
configure a clean boot to disable common startup ...
www.chicagotech.net/netforums/viewtopic.php?t=57

Troubleshooting Vista with clean bootHow to run Windows OS with a
clean ...How to run Windows OS with a clean boot ... when you cannot
determine the cause of the issue, you may run Windows Safe ...
http://www.chicagotech.net/netforums...opic.php?t=778



--
Bob Lin, MS-MVP, MCSE & CNE
Networking, Internet, Routing, VPN Troubleshooting on
http://www.ChicagoTech.net
How to Setup Windows, Network, VPN & Remote Access on
http://www.HowToNetworking.com


"Dennis Snelgrove" <snelgrov@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:15f586df-bc82-4bd7-b8ad-b21c491f67b2@xxxxxx

Yes, I can. I take it that at this point, I should turn on one item at
a time and reboot until the two computers can't see each other again.
At that point I know what the problem program is. Or do you have any
other suggestions?

Thanks for the help, btw. I didn't know about msconfig.exe

On Nov 15, 9:22 am, "Robert L. \(MS-MVP\)" <nore...@xxxxxx>
wrote: