PING does not work

I am supporting a 3 station peer-to-peer W2KPro network with one MSDE “server” and 2 “clients”. The client connection to the MSDE “server” is slow and I noticed PING yields an error “PING not supported etc.” on the “server” and one WS. Any ideas? There is no server OS only one WS running MSDE. I want to ‘fix’ PING. I’ll use a Hosts file to solve the name to IP resolution.