Ping error 10050 not due to firewall

[johnnybgud]

System
Linksys wireless adsl modem router
Computer 1 win XP, Origo wireless lan PCI (2.2 spec) card, 11MBps 'b' works fine in almost every respect apart from not able to set WEP encryption (yet)
Computer 2 Win ME, Belkin wireless lan PCI (2.1 spec, had to be because of older MBoard), 'b', cannot open the Gateway set up page properly from the IE browser, gives a similar result to an extremely slow loading webpage.
ping gives error 10050, but no firewall is installed. From a search I have found that error 10050 is also produced when general network failure occurs. On the Win ME computer I can surf the interent, i.e. download webpages. I don't know how efficiently it is downloading these pages.

The wireless signal strength is very good appox 90%.

Where should I start looking for the problem, the windows networking components (or OS in general), the hardware, the settings?

Thanks for any help

ps Computer 3 is also Win ME with a Belkin PCI card, not tested its ability to acccess or ping the Gateway seems to surf the net OK

pps not really bothered about file sharing etc, i.e. as in a normal LAN, just wanted to share a broaband interent connection between 3/4 computers without having one switched on all the time

 

[johnnybgud]

There is a third computer sharing the internet connection which also runs ME. It can access the internet, ping the gateway and access the setup page by putting the gateway's ip address into IE. It has the same Belkin card in it as computer 2. I have swopped these NICs between them and determined that the problem is not with the cards.

Did some more work last night.
Whilst this problem has been going on I had been trying to run microsoft site's windows update facilty, which had kept trying to install an IE6 update and failing.

Last night, for some unknown reason, the IE6 install process proceeded to completion. Following this I could ping the gateway without the 10050 error. Everything was now working apart from the gateway set-up page 192.168.1.1 which would not load up properly, painfully slow, i.e. minutes. I returned to Microsoft update and carried on letting it identify autoupdates.

After another round of installing these updates the ping response to the gateway reverted to error 10050.

I came across a tip which suggested removing and re-installing microsoft client network software, so I did this with the reboot, and this restored the ping. My guess was that the updates had changed some files, e.g. dlls to its own flavour and re-installing the microsoft client network software forced them back to the original versions.


I returned to microsoft update to complete the updating process and it installed a microsoft security patch and 2 new driver files for the VIA chip set.

Unfortunately on the next reboot access to the internet disappeared, and pings to the adaptor card in the PCI slot (i.e. my computer's hardware address) and gateway gave error 10050.

Now I tried everything taking out and re-installing the NIC, microsoft client software, pings and checking ipconfig, and nothing has restored the internet connection, so it was one step forward, then a big step back.

I have now way of rolling back these updates because I had to disable the Win ME restore function in order to let McAfee Virusscan do a complete check on the sytem, and I had not re-enabled it and created the restore points. With hindsight I should have done this before changing/installing anything.

However, I have not had good experiences with restore within Win ME, in fact it has never worked for me.

In desperation if I can not solve it I am considering letting the other much older WinME computer (seagate HD) re-format my seagate hard drive as its boot drive with the OS installed then putting it into computer 2, or going to Win XP.


But I do not want to lose everything if I can avoid it.

Thanks,

Johnny