Configuring a network of mixed Windows versions

Hi,
Can anyone help me with this? I realise the answer might be a good book, so by all means, if you know one that explains it well, please tell.

I have four Windows machines on a home network, One each of XP, Win 2000 and Win 98, and occassionally I connect an extra machine also running XP.

All machines can access the Internet, but I have varying success with getting them to see each other.

The 98 machine can neither see or be seen by any of the other machines.

The XP machine can log in to the 2000 machine and access all shares on it. It can also access the shares on the second XP machine.

Both the second XP machine and the 2000 machine can see the main XP machine and each other in the network group, but neither have permission to any level of access.

I have tried changing the IPs from auto to within the range 169.254.*.* and the subnet mask 255.255.0.0, but all I succeeded doing with that was losing the internet, so I reset them all back.

Any ideas?

If you have a home network, I would have thought your ISP ip would be 169.x.x.x and your LAN 192.168.1.1 and then set your IPs on the clients to be increments of the 192 address.

If you have a router then chances are it acts as a DHCP client automatically allocating IP addresses and other TCP/IP details to each connected PC. That is the simplest way to get all PCs on the same LAN anyway. Then you might need to deal with desktop firewall issues (e.g. to at least ping from one PC to another) and then other issues to enable networking connectivity at the Windows level (e.g. domain/workgroup/shares etc.).

If you cant see the 98pc at all, can you actually ping the IP address and get contact?Then might be a network card problem. If you can ping it, make sure its in the same workgroup, and that you have file and print sharing configured.