Tried turning off McAffee, gave no real change to the situation. Changed cabling to the NIC, and now I'm sure it's not a link layer problem, definitely something within either the protocol or application layer... Yeah, there's a firewall on the linux box, but it's open to the LAN, and nothing has changed there for months, so not sure it's a variable worth digging into...
One strange error message tha may shed some light on this subject... Within Win XP Pro, from a cmd prompt, typing 'ipconfig /renew' gives the following error:
" WINDOWS IP CONFIGURATION
An error occured while renewing interface Local Area Connection : An operation was attempted on something that was not a socket
"
Strange stuff, I'd say. Googled for it, and it seems it's an issue with "protection" programs inserting themselves into your net stack to intercept god knows what, I guess tcp packets :) I"m going to try working from this angle and give feedback as to success/failure in a week when I can return to this problem.
Thanks all for help thus far for a problem so stupid and annoying on an OS that's so annoying...
Sean
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