My friend is trying to set up a small office network of 3 computers all running windows xp home. It's a very simple set up of a hub connecting the three computers A, B & C

He's asked me to help him set this up but we have come across a slight problem.

It would seem that the xp firewall is stopping two of the computers from communicating properly (A & B). I have turned off the firewall from within the control panel applet on these two computers but it still seems to be having an effect.

I know that the computers are communicating because I can see all three in My Network Places and both computers A and B can open a network share on computer C. A & B can both ping C but not each other and won't return a Ping from computer C.

The third computer (C) doesn't seem to have the xp firewall installed for some reason, although as I didn't install the o/s I don't know why this is.

Any suggestions? Do you think I'm right in that its xp's firewall causing the problems? If so why has turning it off within control panel not stopped it from functioning? :confused:

No I don't think the firewall is causing the problem. A firewall protects from outside invasion.

Since you are using a hub, you don't say how you setup IP addresses. Since you have to do this manually, that could be an issue. You also need to check to see if you have the same workgroup names on all three and whether you have set File and Print sharing as well as created some shares.

Hi Scot,

I've manually configured each network connection

a = 192.168.0.1
b = 192.168.0.2
c = 192.168.0.3

subnet 255.255.255.0 for all.

No default gateway or dns specified

all have file and print services

all joined to the same workgroup name and all with individual computer names within the workgroup.

the reason I looked at the xp firewall first is because I know that it will block ping requests.