Win2000 and XP machines won't talk to each other

This is a plea to help keep the last remaining hairs from being tugged from my sadly balding scalp!

I have two PCs. One runs Win 2000 Pro, the other runs Win XP Home.

They are each connected to a Netgear router which is, in turn, connected to the Internet by cable.

The router acts as a DHCP server and allocates IPs to the two PCs on the fly. They're currently 192.168.1.2 and 192.168.1.3.

Both PCs are members of a Windows workgroup called MYNETWORK.

Folders on both PCs are shared and web-shared.

Both PCs run Sygate Personal Firewall, enabled on both PCs, and the XP PC's own Internet Firewall has been disabled.

So much for the background. As far as the XP PC is concerned, it thinks it's the only PC in that workgroup. The 2000 PC thinks that it is the only PC in that workgroup.

Both PCs see the internet via the router fine.

I had this working once, but then the XP machine had a crash and needed to be rebooted and since then I can't get them to talk to each other.

Can anybody help??

The firewalls are likely to be the problem. You've installed Sygate Personal Firewall on both. This means that as well as preventing access to your computer from the Internet, it will also stop network access within the local network. Personal firewalls either need disabling, or configuring for home networks. You should be able to setup somewhere an option to allow home networking, so it won't block any connections.

Hi Edwin

I have tried all this with the firewalls both enabled and disabled. Same results either way.

As I said, this *was* working before the XP machine crashed. I'm more inclined to think it's possibly something not firewall related.

when u say talk to each other i presume u mean access the files in the shared folders you talk about?

can you ping each machine? with and w/o the firewall?

as edwin says it is prob firewall related...if xp crashed then who knows what it did to the machine or what caused it to crash !!

Hope this helps

RF

If you don't think that it is firewall related, the next step like RadioactiveFrog says, would be to try pinging the other computer, with the firewall disabled and then enabled.

Edwin / RF / anyone else following this thread

Problem solved! You were of course correct about it being firewall related. Here's the solution:

*Exit* the firewall software, as opposed to disabling it (I guess it must make a difference). Bingo, the machines can see each other. Then, you can relaunch the firewall software, and it doesn't make any difference.

Thanks for the suggestions, and I hope this helps anyone else with similar problems.

Glad it is sorted there !! i suspect that it is ok once u restart it as it would probably redetect the network and allow access!! That is at least what happens for me with my firewall!!

Glad ur running again

RF

I've got nothing else to add, but I'll just say that I'm glad you got it working