At least in my experience.

I've got a Win95B box on a 100BT Ethernet network. Our "workgroup" has about 10 Win95, 98, NT and Win2K boxes. My Win98B box can only see 4 of the machines in my workgroup in Network Neighborhood even if all 10 of them are on.

I have a Win2K box in the same office hanging off the same hub that can't see each other, but they can see other Win9x machines in the same workgroup. (The Win2K box can see everything but my Win95B box. The Win95B problems started years before the Win2K box existed. The Win95B box has the problem even if the Win2K box is off.)

I've tried reinstalling Win95B multiple times (which was a disaster I recounted on ezIWeThey), rechecking (multiple times) network settings, replacing the ISA network card with a 3C905B, etc., etc. Nothing's helped.

I assume that something got mangled in the Registry (I tried to make sure it was gone, but possibly didn't get rid of it on my reinstall attempts) and/or some DLL conflict resulted from an update of Office97, or something similar. But something's obviously wrong with the software. :-(

I'd like to know if you ever find your printers again. But I suspect unless you're able to wipe everything on the hard disk, reinstall, reconfigure, etc., you may not be able to figure it out in a reasonable amount of time. And even then something may bite you - do it carefully.

Windows networking problems like these seem to be almost impossible to troubleshoot. :-(

[link|http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/article07-018|This] link at Annoyances.org mentions that sometimes special folders like the Printers folder stop working properly (due to a corrupted or missing desktop.ini) and that TweakUI can fix it sometimes. (Link to TweakUI on the page.) Maybe that'll help.

Good luck, and please report back any successes.

Cheers,
Scott.

My story was just meant to illustrate that Win9x can develop problems with networking (and remote printers) which are seemingly insolvable by mere mortals in a reasonable period of time.

My particular problems have been resolved by using a newer PC - i.e. it wasn't worth fighting with any more. The cost in my time troubleshooting was more than the cost of buying and configuring a new machine.

Thanks for your help though. :-)

Cheers,
Scott.