Vista networking broken…still

Ever since I installed Vista, I have had nothing but trouble with internet and networking.

Here’s a quick description of my network setup – I have 2 computers, one Vista, the other XP connected as peer to peer. They are connected using a cross over ethernet cable. I’ve also tried connecting without the cross over using a switch instead. I have them networked mainly to share files and occasionally to allow the XP computer to use the dialup on the Vista computer.

The first thing I noticed was that my internet was really slow. Now I only have dial-up, but its worse then my XP computer. The funny thing is, when I disconnect the Vista computer from the network, the internet becomes faster.

The other thing and the most aggravating, is that I have been unable to share files from the Vista computer. I can share files from the XP computer and share the dialup connection from the Vista machine, but even this has not been consistent.

I believe most of my problems stem from the fact that Vista will not identify my network. My local network always shows up as “unidentified”, thus it always sets up my network location as “public”. If I try to change the location to private, it will revert back to public after a restart. Worse yet, if I connect to the internet after changing my local network to “private”, it will set the internet as private also.

I have searched the internet high and low, read thru numerous forum posts and searched the Microsoft KB and Dell with no luck. I have turned off DHCP and used a static ip, turned off ipv6 and network topology mapping and updated my NIC drivers, ect. I’ve changed settings every which way but loose and nothing helps.

Here’s the kicker… I had access to a DSL modem a few weeks ago, so I decided for snots and giggles I would hook it up to my computer and for the first time ever, Vista identified my network location as “Home”. Unfortunately I only had the DSL modem for a very short time so I could not test the functionality of my network.

I apologize for the long post.

Can anyone shed some light on this? Is this something that SP1 will fix?

XPS 410 Win Vista
Core 2 Duo E6600/2.4GHZ
1 GB 667MHz Ram
250GB 7200RPM HD
DVD Rom/DVD RW
Nvidia 7900GS 256MB
Sound Blaster X-FI

Intel Gigabit 82541 NIC