So I repaved my WinXP machine at home last week (more on this later). I reinstalled everything and all was well. Except on thing. I couldn’t see my second WinXP machine with my machine. I also couldn’t see our laser printer (which lives by itself on our LAN). It was weird, the second computer could see my machine just fine. I could also connect with mine to the second machine via its IP address (\\10.0.0.15\foo). After several hours of twiddling settings, changing ip addresses, computer names, and workgroup names, I realized my computer’s Subnet mask was set to 255.255.255.248 instead of 255.255.255.0. Foul, foul, filth, foul! That was a lot of rebooting for no apparent reason. WTF is up with Subnet masks anyway? Just another fricking settings to f-up. Ah well, at least it’s working now.