I wonder if anyone can help me out here. We currently have two PCs
running Home Premium 32 bit - one with SP1, one without (it hangs during
install, and then bluescreens after forcing a reboot, requiring a
rollback and system restore - ugh).

Anyway, we've been having gradually worsening network issues with the
non upgraded PC over the last few weeks. Initially, it was when we tried
to share the root of one disk - it completely trashed the network
sharing etc - the network became limited, we couldn't enable network
sharing, and again had to restore to prior to setting up the network
share (because we couldn't access the settings to unshare it - network
sharing was that broken). Once that was done, we realised we could share
folders within a drive OK, and my housemate was able to copy files from
shares on my PC to his, and vice versa. However, today the network issue
has worsened to it's current state.

He can share folders still (as long as it's not the root of a drive)
and he can copy some files to a writable share on my PC, but some files
fail to copy, it thoroughly thrashes his network connection and it takes
forever. The main problem, however, is that if I try to browse to his PC
via Explorer (whether through the network link or a direct share, it
will almost immediately (within 20 seconds) result in his network
connectivity dropping to limited, killing any internet access and
stopping me from browsing. As a result, I'm not able to actually copy
any files from his shares as simply viewing the list of shares or
accessing one and listing the files causes this problem (and
subsequently, my PC complaining that it can't access the file or folder,
as would be expected). It takes a reboot to fix this.

This is proving incredibly frustrating - his PC is patched completely
up to SP1 (but not including SP1) while mine is patched completely.
We've tried different network cards without any difference. We've tried
repairing the network adapter but Vista simply reported that it couldn't
fix it (without actually saying anything useful as to what it could fix
- no error codes or anything helpful). We've tried network drivers (it
has the most up to date). I'm not honestly sure where to go from here.
I'm pretty sure that something is very wrong with his install (between
that and SP1) and it quite frankly needs reinstalling. As we have 4Gb
RAM in both PCs we do want to upgrade to 64bit to make full use of it
but getting Vista installed and working on this PC was a nightmare in
the first place (for no known reason - the hardware is all good, it
tests OK in other boxes, and initially Vista installed fine but on
reinstalling the OS, it decided it was going to be incredibly difficult,
patching was iffy, had a propensity to hang at various points etc) so I
really want to avoid reinstalling unless absolutely necessary - and I'm
also pretty confused as to why it seems to be failing over time...

Any help or ideas would be gratefully received (and I apologise for any
lack of info and so on).


--
Ratchick