Banging my head against a wall

I'm running XP Pro and my small network at home (2 PCs and a router) has been down "inexplicably" for 2 weeks and I've been attempting to fix it at random intervals to no success.

Well I'm not sure what the hell changed since it was basically plug n play since I hooked it up, but turns out I now have to manually set all my TCP/IP settings and then add each network IP to MS's internal "Internet Gateway" as a "service." Where the hell this gateway bs came from I'm not sure since I didn't need to configure it this way before. And how the hell I was supposed to realize that I needed to add each machine's address as service I cannot gather. That wasn't part of their oh so simple networking wizard at all.

Granted I'm no networking person, just a good ole programmer but I just thought I'd share my anger at MS for being complete jar...gon....heads.

try deleting tcp/ip protocol and reinstalling it might fix problem.

Thanks.

Well I think with my solution the problem is technically fixed since I have communication between my 2 machines now.

But you know I never did actually delete the TCP/IP protocol itself and reinstall it. I just assumed whenever I removed the drivers for each networking device it would do so automatically.

true you probably did. you could reset the router or check the config since it was working and all of a sudden stopped.

Yeah I played with those settings and reset it. Even unplugged it for awhile in hopes that maybe it was putting locks on certain IP addresses it was giving out.

Looks like no DHCP for me for the time being.

weird I wonder how it was working before? is it wireless or are you pc's wireless?