Wow. Well,that was about like pulling teeth. I ran through a grocery list of things to do on the way to reinstalling TCP/IP, including changing out the cables, scanning for adware, fixing default gateways and DNS addresses, repairing adapters, and reinstalling Winsock. So it's hard to say what helped and what didn't, but in the end run the main problem appears to have indeed been the TCP/IP. Thing is that everytime I'd reinstall it, everything would work fine (pinging both computers by name, everything listed in Net View, names appearing under the workgroup, and NetBIOS over TCP/IP status disappeared in Ipconfig/all). But everytime I'd reboot, Windows would say that it was not able to start normally, giving me the option to go into safe mode. I'd refix the LAN address and reenable NetBIOS over TCP/IP. Then when I'd reboot, Windows would restart, but NetBIOS over TCP/IP would again appear as disabled in Ipconfig/all, while enabled in properties. So apparently, I'm assuming that something in my startup menu was messing with it. I ran msconfig, disabled everything in startup, reinstalled TCP/IP and rebooted and everything seems to be running fine. My only problem now, is that the wireless laptop (computer #2) gives me a "system error 5" when I try to do a net view of the tower (computer #1, attached to the wireless router). Computer #1, however, is able to do a net view of both itself and computer #2. So, I'm going to look that up. Hopefully it's an easy fix! Have not tried connecting to the internet yet, either, so I'm crossing my fingers.
Anyhow, thank you very much for your help!! So relieved that reinstalling TCP/IP made such a big difference.
- Scott