DescentBB

This is perhaps the most bizzare malfunction I have ever seen in windows.

I recently re-installed windows 2000 professional on my laptop. This is the third install of win2k in its lifetime. Well, anyway, you know how the status of LAN adaptors is generally promptly autodetected and reported? (Local Area Connection 1 disconnected, etc) Well, for some odd reason They arent being reported corectly for me anymore. I have to go into control panel, go into network and dialup connections, and hit f5 for the system to realize that I've plugged the ethernet cable in or disconected it, or disabled it, or enabled it, etc. This only happens a little while after Ive booted, never immediately after a reboot.

Anyone ever seen such behavior in win2k or xp? And if so, how is it solved?

have u tryed a differnt network cable

i know its stupid but it doesnt hert to try

Tried all 7 of my availible cables, same result.

Funky NIC driver? Looked for an update from the vendor or re-install the one you have now?

If you are using the ones built into the OS, ditch those and get the vendor made version

Well its the same NIC driver I've been using since forever on this comp. The Nic itself is a Realtek RTL8139(A)-Based PCI Fast Ethernet Adaptor if that tells anyone anything.

Does completely removing it, uninstalling the driver and reinstalling it help?

Krom and I are on the same page here. The first thing I would have done is removed the TCP/IP stack and reloaded it. if that didn't work, remove everything network and reinstall the NIC (new drivers if available) and protocals.

Yep. And if all that fails, try a new network card.

I'll do the reinstall thing when I have time. As for a new nic, thats impossible as its integrated. I'd have to get a PCMCIA card.

Vader wrote: As for a new nic, thats impossible as its integrated. I'd have to get a PCMCIA card.

Contradiction at it's finest

"Getting a new nic" to me represents ripping out the old one and putting a new one in its place. Not possible, as its a laptop nic thats built in.

Back off, I'm here to resolve this issue, not argue semantics.

Additionally, my PCMCIA slot is occupied by a wireless nic that gets frequent use.

Why am I even explaining this anyway?

Because I caught you in a wonderful little contradiction

Go amuse yourself somewhere else. If you have nothing productive to offer here, buzz off, k?

Wtf do you think I have been doing asshat? Jesus... until you let us know if you have, or have not had any success with the items we (Krom and myself) offered you, were kinda waiting.. On you I might add. Vander!

Fine then.

The update is this: Ive swapped out the drivers for the latest I could find and so far I dont know. It might be fixed, it might not. As Ive said, it never occured just after a startup. It might not start for a few days even. But what I'd like to know is what else might be causing this. The driver I was using was the same driver that I had been using since day one of owning my laptop and has never, ever given me any problems.

Well, with the new drivers installed, its doing it again. However, I have an idea of why its doing it.

Every so often I get an error message from windows stating that "scvhost.exe has generated errors and will be closed by windows, an error log is being created". So I open the event log and see whatexactly happens when scvhost goes down. What happens is that it takes about 8 services with it (presumeably because theyre hosted within scvhost.exe), one of them being "Network Connections" service, wose description in the services control panel reads "Manages objects in the Network and Dial-Up Connections folder, in which you can view both local area network and remote connections."

I have since set this service to restart if it fails unexpectedly, however, having manually started and restarted this service has not helped this problem. I have set all the other services that go down with scvhost to autorestart as well.

Well, any ideas on why scvhost would crash to begin with?

Also, my media files are acting wierd in that they show that theyre to be opened by windows media player, however whenever I click on any of them to open them, I get the "Select program" box and have to manually select windows media player from the list of installed programs.

Should I just nuke this windows install and start over? Or are these problems at all fixable?

Ya format then reinstall, if it still doesnt work after that then its 99% likely your network card has gone bad and will totally fail eventually.