Ahhh File Sharing and Networking issues

[markbarry1977]

First things first this is going to be a long one.

I have two computers one called Laptop and one called desktop (both have win xp home with SP2) I have disabled both norton firewall and xp firewall on both. They are both in the same workgroup MSHOME, both have file sharing enabled and tcp/ip protocalls installed.

I have a cable internet connection and wireless Zyxel router.

Both LAPTOP and DESKTOP can ping the router (192.168.1.1), neither computer can ping each other either using ping 192.169.1.X or using ping LAPTOP or ping DESKTOP.

When i go to network places and click on view workgroup computers i get an error message saying serverzdomin is unavailible and to contact the administrator. (not suprising as i can't even ping each other).

You will have to excuse my stupidity but wireless networking is a bit of a white magic thing to me.

All help and guidence greatfully appreciated

[johnwill]

Wired or wireless makes no difference, the problem here seems clearly to be a firewall that is still blocking the PING. Failure to ping is 99.9% of the times a firewall.

[markbarry1977]

Thanks for your post, i have since managed to fix the problem, although the solution was not obviouse and again goes to show how poor i believe norton to be. I did as i said disableing norton on both machine, and this still failed to help, what i did then was went into the task manager and found that although i had disabled the firewall the norton processors were still running, out of interest i then dissabled the processors relating to norton av and firewall and guess what it works not problem, so ther you go it's a bit of a pain in the butt to have to manually close each process down but it works. Im now looking into trying to configure the firewall properly to see if i can leave it running and still file and print share.


Again thanks to all that have read or responded to help me out it is much appreciated and if i do find a solutionto the problem then i will be sure to post the answer here, as for now im file sharing at least it's so much easier

[johnwill]

My solution to Norton issues is to uninstall it totally, then throw away the CD so there's no chance it gets installed again.

[markbarry1977]

I am rapidly starting to think that i should burn the disk and post it back to symantec.


I dont suppose anybody knows of a good asvice to totaly remove norton. I am thinking of going for avg and zone alarm (both free) does anybody have any opinions on these two pieces of software

[johnwill]

Those work for many folks, I use AVG Free here.

You can use the Norton Removal Tool to totally remove all things Norton. Note that there are a few issues with that procedure if you have QuickBooks installed, it seems it screws it up. However, for most configurations, the removal tool will finish the job after you run through all the Add/Remove Program entries for Norton.