Hello,I recently bought two HP Vista 64 bit laptops, one for me any one for my wife. I set up both machines. My wife's laptop can get to the older XP machines through that are connected to our wireless router, my laptop cannot. I have Avast anti-virus and Commodo firewall on both laptops. I added both new Vista machines to our existing workgroup (my wife's laptop was able to connect to the network before I did this). I've tried temporarily disabling the firewall on my laptop, but I still cannot ping the other machines from my desktop, but my wife's laptop can. Any idea what to look at next?-Eric

Hello Eric, Thank you for using the forums! Before we continue to further diagnose the issue, you'll need to make sure Commodo Firewall is properly configured for the LAN. I have not used the program but the firewall should allow you add the ip address of invidual machines or your network as trusted. If you have any further problems, I suggest you either visit https://support.comodo.com/index.phpor temporarily uninstall the firewall program to see if the problem persists. -- Eric Cross Microsoft MVP (Windows Desktop Experience) http://mvp.support.microsoft.com

Eric Cross wrote: Hello Eric, Thank you for using the forums! Before we continue to further diagnose the issue, you'll need to make sure Commodo Firewall is properly configured for the LAN. I have not used the program but the firewall should allow you add the ip address of invidual machines or your network as trusted. If you have any further problems, I suggest you either visit https://support.comodo.com/index.phpor temporarily uninstall the firewall program to see if the problem persists. -- Eric Cross Microsoft MVP (Windows Desktop Experience) http://mvp.support.microsoft.com I temporarily uninstalled the firewall, but the result was the same. I had allconfigured my firewall on all my machines to allow each others' ip addresses access, which is why my wife's laptop can see the other computers on the network. So it's definitely not a problem with Comodo, anything else I can try?-Eric

Have you tried pinging the Vista computer both by name and by IP address? What were the errors? -- Eric Cross Microsoft MVP (Windows Desktop Experience) http://mvp.support.microsoft.com

You should probably also check to see if the Windows Vista firewall is also enabled.

When I started up my laptop after I got home tonight I discovered that I can see the other PCs now in my Workgroup (not sure what changed).After reading your post,I disabled the Vista firewall, I didn't see any change as far as ping goes. Up until now I've been doing all my ping attempts by IP, my old desktop had been turned off, I just turned it back on. So here's what I'm seeing as far as ping tests: by IP by NameWife's old XP desktop times out couldn't find host (I renamed it and rebooted, maybe that's affecting it)My old XP desktop ok ok Wife's new Vista laptop times out resolves ip address but times outKeep in mind that I can now "see" all these machines in my workgroup, but the ping stuff doesn't work.I tried doing an ipconfig /release then a /renew then a /flushdns, but I still can't ping my wife's old desktop by name.My wife's old desktop has the older version of comodo, all the other machines have the newer version.Although, I can "see" these machines I can't get to the printer that's attached to my wife's old desktop, my wife's laptop can get to it.Also, FWIW my wife's old desktop's old name shows up in the workgroup together with it's new name (I rebooted as prompted when I renamed it). I can't ping it by the old name either. I'm not sure why it still shows up, doing a flushdns didn't help. Maybe I need to reboot my router? My router's maintenance website only shows the new name.-Eric

I found out something rather interesting. There's an user account that's typically the account that's logged into my wife's old desktop. If I log out of that account and/or into another account. I can ping my wife's old desktop from my new laptop and I can attach to the printer that's plugged into it. Any idea what's changing when I log into that account?-Eric

OK, I figured it out. In the older version of Comodo (version 2.4) that I had on my wife's old XP desktop I had defined a "network control rule" to allow inbound and outbound traffic from computers that were in a group called something like "my home network". Earlier, I had updated the range of ip addresses that were in "my home network" group to add the ip addresses for my wife and I new laptops. However, in looking at the "network control rule" I saw that it's showing allow all inbound and outbound traffic from the "my home network" group but it's showing the older, smaller range of ip addresses. Because I had my old desktop turned off my wife's laptop got its ip address, which happened to be in this range of allowable ip addresses. Therefore, she could connect to her old desktop, but I was out of luck. I went to the definition of this "network control rule" and reselected the "my home network" from the dropdown list of available defined groups. When I did this lo and behold I see the displayed range of ip addresses was refreshed and I was able to get in. It's really strange that it kept this range of ip addresses (not refreshing the rule to reflect the change that I'd made to the network definition) when I had rebooted my wife's old desktop a couple times.It also appears that the firewall settings for Comodo, at least version 2.4, are user-specific.-Eric

Well I guess that was a partial answer. I wanted to be able to get some files, etc off my old desktop, so I installed tightvnc on it, but wasn't happy with it's file copy abilities (the remote control seemed just fine), so I upgraded my old desktop from XP Home to XP Pro to get the remote desktop client. I now can see it in the workgroup, but can't ping it by name or ip. I stopped the firewall altogether on it and it still doesn't seem to be there, except that it appears in my workgroup.