PCs lock up after network upgrade Why?

Symptoms:
The symptoms of the problem are that the workstation becomes unresponsive or "locked-up" while in applications that use TCP/IP to communicate. This includes NetScape, Internet Explorer, MS Outlook, TRIS, Oracle, and Vantive among others. The only recourse once the system becomes unresponsive is a hard reset or power cycle on the system. A shutdown will NOT complete once this anomaly has occurred.

Background:
It is indeterminate if the exact cause of the problem is a result of the network upgrades. What can be reasonably inferred is that whatever the root cause of the problem turns out to be, the network activity appears to have created or exacerbated a connectivity issue on some workstations that historically have had none.

Applied Activities:
We now have a potentially identified solution that expresses relief on 4 workstations. These are encouraging results that appear to isolate problematic files on the workstations exhibiting the symptoms; however, they have not been applied extensively enough to proof the concept. This is where we have a problem. The files that are being applied cannot, in our testing thus far, be applied consistently and uniformly to ALL workstations based on instructions received. We have the list of files that Should be applied, but the package(s) obtained do not appear to update files as they should, consistently. We have managed to piece together the correct files for the 4 workstations above with positive results, but cannot consistently reproduce those results on further workstations. Attempts to do this have proved costly to service for the few that have been tried. This is the reason for the delay in further testing.