Very strange internet problem with XP Home.

[bizzybody]

Customer has two XP Home PCs connected to a D-Link broadband router. On one of them, everything works perfectly fine online. On the other, it can send and receive e-mail using Outlook Express and it can access the shared drive on the other PC.

Nothing else online or on the LAN works from this PC.

It cannot ping any IP address or URL, not even the router or e-mail server or the other PC. It cannot access the router's web based configuration either. I've set the LAN and Internet security settings to the next to no security setting and disabled Windows firewall. The router has nothing blocked, is not doing any port forwarding or anything else restrictive, nor can it be set to have different security settings per port.

The system was setup using DHCP from the router, with the DNS IPs set in it. I disabled DHCP on the router and manually assigned IPs etc on the two PCs. NO CHANGE. One still worked just fine, the other can only send-receive e-mail.

The one that has no problems still has IE6, the problem box has had IE7 installed- presumably the internet stuff was working BEFORE IE7 was installed because Windows had to be validated.

HTF can a PC get e-mail when it can't ping the server (or anything else) from a command prompt?!

I also tried the Internet Setup Wizard, went through everything for an always on connection. It created an icon for the connection in Network Connections- tagged as Disabled. I rightclickd that and clicked Enable. It deleted the icon.

(Grrrrrr! Yet another thing for "Windows Networking Sledgehammer" to fix.)

[M4ngr0v3]

does the problem PC work if you remove the router and the OK PC?