Thanks to everyone who offered help and advice. In the end the vital piece of missing advice was "plug the network card of your 'to-be-installed' domain controller, into some other network device such as a hub or another pcīs network card". After I did that the instalation of AD worked fine and now I have my little test environment...... Now why couldnīt Microsoft put that in their "step-by-step" guide !!! Way to go Microsoft. Thanks again, Mark Abbiss
application/ms-tnef