Bad hardware? how to check?

[robinsdale]

Hi,
I've just set up a Asus A7N226-VM with an AMD 1300 Duron to be a gateway to broadband internet via cable modem for our little home LAN (7 PCs). The Asus comes with an internal NIC which is giving me grief. Although Win98se Device Manager sees the adapter and the appropriate drivers are loaded and 'working properly', the PC cannot see itself nor can it see other PCs on the LAN. Interestingly, others can see *it* and access the shared drive.
I'm trying to determine whether this is a configuration or hardware issue... all systems have the standard home setup:
192.168.0.xx
255.255.255.0
I thought maybe the hub was bad, so I used a little-used cross-over cable to connect the offending system to one that I know works fine. I issue a 'find computer' from the network neightborhood pull-down menu, and the new system 'find' the other one just fine, but won't open it, citing:

\MyPC is not accessible. No error information is available.

I've had this network for some time now, and the setting seem to work for the rest of the systems - use only TCP, all have shared drives, all enable file sharing, all use Windows logon, all on same workgroup.
Any ideas?
Cheers,
Robyn