I provide the technical support for an international photographic competition and this involves setting up a temporary wired Ethernet network to interconnect several laptops during our entry processing or judging sessions. This network uses a small 5-port Fast Ethernet switch and fixed IP addresses.Previously, Ionly used laptops running Windows XP andeverything was fine.I'm now trying to add a new laptop running Vista Home Premium and am hitting problems due to my total lack of any previous Vista experience. I have managed to set the IP address on the Vista laptop but it cannot 'see' any other machines on the network and the XP laptopscannot gain access to the Vista machine. Some basic facts: There are 4 laptops in this network. Their names are Dell-M20,Louis, Scc-No-1 and Scc-No-2(Louis is the Vista laptop). If I open Windows Explorer in each machine and try to view the network I get the following results.Dell-M20 seesLouis, Scc-No-1 and Scc-No-2Louis sees Louis onlyScc-No-1 seesDell-M20,Louis, Scc-No-1 and Scc-No-2Scc-No-2 seesDell-M20,Louis, Scc-No-1 and Scc-No-2 The Vista machine (Louis)can successfully ping all the other machines but pings from the XP machines to the Vista laptop all time out. All the fixed IP addresses have been checked. They only differ in the final number of the set of 4. I would appreciate some guidance on how to get my Vista laptop talking to the others.David

Hi David, Thank you for posting. Based on my research, I would like to suggest the following: 1. Regarding the issue that the Windows XP computer cannot ping the Windows Vista laptop, please refer to the following documents: Nobody Can Ping My Computer http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc749323.aspx 2. Please check if all the updates have been applied on all of the computers. 3. Please ensure "Network Discovery" is turned on in "Network and Sharing Center" on the Windows Vista laptop. 4. Please make sure that the Link Layer Topology Discovery (LLTD) has been enabled on the Windows Vista computer and the Link Layer Topology Discovery (LLTD) Responder has been installed on the Windows XP computers. Link Layer Topology Discovery (LLTD) Responder (KB922120) http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=4F01A31D-EE46-481E-BA11-37F485FA34EA&displaylang=en 5. Please check the sharing: 1) Please try to access: \\127.0.0.1 on your Windows Vista computer to see if you can see you local sharing. 2) Access other computers share with both \\computer name\folder and XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX\folder to see if they are works. Please do this on the Windows Vista computer as well as the Windows XP computers. Hope this helps. Nicholas Li - MSFT

vista and link layer topology alot of people are haveing this problemJoshua Randall