After stuffing around on Kiyomi’s laptop for the past two days I have finally found what was causing the problem (which was causing me to rip my hair out) and how to fix it.
Having rebuilt her Windows XP (Home) laptop after a nasty homepage hijacker got into the system (Thank you SO much Micro$oft for making unsafe/insecure software), and re-installing various programmes and utilities I tried to access it from my own XP (Pro) machine – no luck. UNC paths – ppffthh…, Tried to ping her PC’s hostname – zilch, I could ping her IP address though which really threw me – I tried to renew her IP address and got an error about NetPT not being started. Ah-ha! Checked the event viewer and sure enough it hadn’t started for some wacky reason. Did a web search and found the following page:
http://www.techspot.com/vb/archive/index/t-9007.html
Which was exactly what I was after. Seems that one of the Utils mentioned in the techspot article disabled NetBT (Don’t know which one), I followed the instructions, changed the registry and, bang!, I could ping Kiyomi’s PC’s hostname too. Problem solved. (Phew)
As a result of this, she is no longer going to use IE (Internet Exploder) on the PC. Added a few extra spyware and adware utils to keep the laptop healthy.
— David