wonders shall never end

I connected twohe ot laptops with a crossover cable, one vista and other xp

my observations

1. vista laptop is pinging 127.0.0.1 but cannot ping its ip address
2. vista laptop is pinging xp but xp laptop cannot ping vista

comments are welcomed

sose

It sounds like you have a firewall set on Vista. Windows firewall (by default) blocks incomming ping requests.

turn off both firewalls on both computers.

What ip address and subnet mask did you assign to the two computers?

private ip

192.168.0.2
192.168.0.3

I've had a similar problem with 2 XP machines. It's been driving me nvts. I put wireshark to work on both machines and saw something strange...

The arp requests both ways worked, but the ping only worked in one direction. Machine1 would arpr, machine 2 would respond,(correct mac and all) M1 would echo requestk, M2 would respond 4x.

But the other way no good... M2 would arp, 1 would respond, 2 would echo request, 1 wouldn't respond.

Each could ping themselves.

I tried a clear arp, rebooted messed around with the ethernet settings... nothing.

Did you get any wireshark or anything run to look at the network?

Todd

P.S. NO firewalls on either.