Hi. I ran into a strange problem that I will try to explain the best I can.

I run a network at a small business that has 5 pcs and 1 macbook on wired and wireless connections to several different switches.

Until yesterday my network was working 100%.

Yesterday I was asked to switch the physical locations of 2 of our PCs.

After shutting down both PCs and moving them to each others' location, turning on etc I encountered something strange. Both of these PCs are shown under the LAN workgroup but when I click on either of them I get "Path Not Found." But it should be entirely obvious that the path is found because windows recognized both PCs in the workgroup.

I did some searching on the net and found that I need to be able to run ICS. I tried to enable this but "Windows cannot enable Internet Connection Sharing Service."

Windows lists this cause:

This problem is caused by a missing or corrupted SharedAccess.reg file. The SharedAccess.reg file represents the Windows Firewall service.

Step 1 shows how to created the sharedaccess.reg file.

step 2:

1. Double-click Sharedaccess.reg to merge the contents of this file into the registry and to create the Windows Firewall entry.

when I double click, I get this error: "Windows cannot find the regedit.exe file, would you like to create a new one?"

So I open C:\windows and sure enough regedit isn't there. Nor is it in system32. so I get out my handy windows disk, open CMD, type "Copy d:\i386\regedit.exe c:\windows" and it copies the file successfully.

when I double click sharedaccess.reg, I get the same error: "Windows Cannot find Regedit.exe file, would you like to create a new one?"

NO.


I'm using Windows XP pro, SP2, and I have NEVER had this problem until I moved the physical location. Why did such a simple task result in such a disaster? now my small business network is compromised, I can't use regedit, and file sharing must be done with flash memory!


What did I do wrong? How do I rectify this?????