Hello, Note - I am just finishing up some HJT therapy with a fine person called rstones12 over in the other forum. I am here now because I have a problem that I don't think is hijack related. I have an emachines laptop running XP HE SP-1. It's been a good little feller and still does most of its tricks - except for some basic network funtionality. I'm sitting here, on this website, talking to you - but if I open a cmd window and try to ping anything, it will just sit there and do nothing. The prompt never returns. The rest of my session is ok. I can use other programs and surf the web. I just can't talk to the cmd window any more. ^C, ^D, , nothing wakes up the window. Right - I just tried some of this stuff to refresh my memory, including a netstat command, and now I think I'm in danger of crashing. I can't kill the process or the command window and I think that I'd better bail now. Any ideas? Thanks, Technopolis