Quote:
Originally posted by Rara:
a little more detail.

I have a cable modem, that goes into my router/hardware firewall which splits off to the (now) XP box, and another box w/ win98SE.

The 98 box has ZERO problems w/ any sort of connection at all (well, it can't see the XP box when it drops its connection)

I have the latest drivers for my netgear nic, and netgear swears its fully compatible w/ XP.

I have tried to remove/reinstall all of the network components for the connection, and all of the repair crap, etc, w/ no change. (an attempted repair after it drops out comes back w/ a "can't renew IP")

Also, some may have misunderstood, this IS a fresh install of XP, I initially did do the upgrade, not expecting it to work very well, and I was right, so I did a complete flush of my system, even reformatting to NTFS and a full fresh install of XP Pro.

Keep the ideas flowing, somehting has got to work!!! This is so frustrating and random!
It seems you have tried most of the hardware things you can try, let's work on software. Some questions:
1) Do you have any programs accessing the net constantly?
2) Have tried accessing the net before you loaded any other programs when you installed XP?

If you can't answer two, you could try useing MSCONFIG to turn off all apps when you boot-up. Only turn off any 'User' processes. Don't use that annoying Diagnostic startup button, seems to cause problems with the registration.

Another thing to try is wait for the problem to happen again and see if you can access the router directly. This is a reason why I like Netgear stuff; Launch a browser, type in http://192.168.0.1
Your User name is 'admin'
and your password is '1234'
Unless you changed it.

Click on the DHCP table & system status and see what it says. Good hunting.