btw, figured out the problem. well, maybe they fixed it and that combined with what i did on my end did the trick. it was an IP conflict issue that is notorious with win NT servers.
i monkeyed around with it last night. unplugged the lan and rebooted without it. left it down for awhile. after i rebooted, i zapped all the network connections and reinstalled. released them in winipcfg. got a new NIC (hardware) address and that seems to have done the trick.
so yeah, they were having technical problems but they apparently don't know their ass from a hole in the ground to help anyone with the problem when it occurs. pathetic.
this is what i found on the net last night when trying to fix it myself: http://www.win2000mag.com/Articles/Index.cfm?ArticleID=5413 http://www.mbnet.mb.ca/~kolson/tecnotes/19971108.html http://developer.novell.com/research/sections/netsupport/networkts/2000/may/networkts.htm http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q194/8/34.asp
k