Vista - Something wrong with Vista networking? Some hints about enablingping and file sharing on local network

Hi,

Like a number of others here, I've been struggling trying to get Vista
(Home Premium in my case) networking working on my home LAN. I had
applied all of the "usual suspects", i.e., in my case, I disabled the
firewall, enabled NetBIOS over TCP, etc., but at first I couldn't even
ping other machines on my LAN (192.168.0.0).

So, I started looking at the Vista routing table (route print), and
started experimenting.

In particular, there was one route:

192.168.0.0 255.255.255.0 on-link 192.168.0.4

I think that this is the route to the 192.168.0 subnet, so I tried
changing it to use my NAT router as the gateway:

route change 192.168.0.0 mask 255.255.255.0 192.168.0.1 metric 1 if 8

After doing that I could then ping other machines on my home LAN
successfully, and I could also "net view" individual machines (e.g.,
"net view \\testwin2k"). I could also map drives manually.

But, the plain "net view" still returns a 6118 error.

ONCE IN A WHILE, if I do the above "route change" several times, I can
get "net view" to work, and when that works, I can then see the machines
on my local network in "Network", but I can't do this consistently, even
if I reboot between tries.

Now, from looking at the routing table on other machines, it seems that
the original route for 192.168.0 was "correct", even though it prevented
ping from working, so I'm really starting to wonder what is going on
here, and if there may be something wrong with the networking in Vista?

Anyway, I thought I'd post the above info. Maybe someone who
understands how the new network stack in Vista works can explain?

Thanks,
Jim