I’m stumped on this one. I have a user in a branch office who has sporadic problems connecting to the network. It’s a small office, with a single NT4 server. His computer is XP Pro. Worked fine for quite a while, but in the last couple of weeks, this has happened a few times, 2-3 times this week alone. He starts up his computer in the morning (7 – 7:30), and can’t see the network. No internet, no email, no mapped drives. Event viewer errors say no domain controller or DHCP can be found. Assigns a 169… IP address. Checked the cable, checked the NIC, everything seems ok. Rebooted and shut down/restarted several times.
Then, around 8:30, he suddenly appears on the network. Event log has a tcpip event that says the system found the network adapter, and initiated normal operation. This happened before, but I didn’t have access to the logs. He called to say he couldn’t connect, and when I called him back, it had magically started to work.
I don’t even know where to START trying to troubleshoot this. Any ideas? It’s a Dell Dimension 4500, with whatever NIC they include. Nobody else is having this problem in that office, including the other XP machine (they’re still mostly 9x, with two new XP’s).