1 NE4100
and EFA PCMCIA Incompatibility.
2 Eagle
NE200T PCMCIA NE200.COM ODI Driver Does Not Work.
3 IBMODISH.COM
Causes Windows 95 to Exit at Startup.
4 3Com
3C5x9 EtherLink III "Plug and Play" problems.
5 MS
Client and PC/NFS conflict on some Xircom/IBM/Cabletron adapters.
6 Errors
and retransmissions with a SoundBlaster installed.
7 What
voodoo is required to get a Xircom Token Ring adapter to work on a Toshiba
laptop?
8 WINIPCFG
returns incorrect hardware address on Dell PCs
9 MS
Mouse Intellipoint driver/network incompatibility.
10 MsgSvr32
crashes when PC Card NICs are inserted, but network isn't active.
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Date: Fri, 08 Dec 95 12:25:00 -0800
From: Nick Sayer <[email protected]>
[RCG Update (still more updates below): the following is also true of the EFA-207 OEM card, which is remarketed under the name "ComTree" and other names. The manufacturer's new driver does not completely fix the problem, which is still being investigated.]
The NE4100 PCMCIA card is not compatible with win95, despite being on the HCL. Here's the story:
What I believe is happening is that the NE4100 "support" simply is to just run with an NE2000 driver when you see an NE4100. This is not quite the correct thing to do.
Real NE2000 cards have a small ROM in their I/O space that contains the Ethernet address. A PCMCIA card has to have about a K of attribute ROM located elsewhere anyway in order to describe the card to the card-n-socket services. The folks who make PCMCIA NE2000 cards didn't bother to put the extra Ethernet address ROM in the I/O space as well, they simply placed the Ethernet address in the attribute ROM (usually at 0xff0) and left it up to the enabler or driver to do the right thing.
win95 does not do the right thing. It will use ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff as the Ethernet address for an NE4100. I reported this to the $35 tech support line and even more detail than the above paragraph. I told them exactly how a PCMCIA NE2000 differs from a real one. I even gave them tcpdump logs showing them the bogus packets (oh, by the way, the first thing win95 TCP does is send out an arp packet asking for its own Ethernet address. That's right: "arp: who is win95, tell win95"). I have not heard back from them.
[Moderator's addendum: the arp is a way of avoiding duplicate IP addresses. I think this is a Good Thing. As of October 1, 1995, Nick had still not heard back from Microsoft, the NE4100 was still on the Hardware Compatibility List, and the MS technical support lines were unaware of the problem. On November 9th, the Windows 95 Product Manager, Yusuf Mehdi, gave me the email address of the person at Microsoft who was responsible for the NE2000 driver, and I sent him a couple of email messages, but he never got back to me. On December 8th, I personally handed a detailed description of this problem to Yves Michali, Program Manager, Microsoft Windows Networking Development. I have not heard back from them.]
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Date: Tue, 10 Oct 1995 00:00:00 -0700
From: Rich Graves <[email protected]>
If you have problems with such a card, get updated information from article Q132787 in the Microsoft Knowledge Base.
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Date: Tue, 10 Oct 1995 00:00:00 -0700
From: Rich Graves <[email protected]>
Using the similar SMC8000.COM driver might solve the problem. See article Q130339 in the Microsoft Knowledge Base.
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Date: Thu, 07 Dec 95 10:15:00 -0800
From: Rich Graves <[email protected]>
The otherwise excellent 3Com 3C5x9 EtherLink III card, one of the early adopters of plug-and-play technology, has a somewhat whimsical early PnP implementation that doesn't always work. 3Com has acknowledged the problem and includes a special utility to turn off PnP support with the latest drivers on ftp.3com.com. Since Win95 will usually detect and configure the card successfully without PnP active, you don't lose anything.
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Date: Tue, 10 Oct 1995 00:00:00 -0700
From: Rich Graves <[email protected]>
From article Q130651 in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
A Windows 95 computer running SunSoft's PC-NFS version 5.x and the Microsoft Client for Microsoft Networks may not be able to see shared resources on a PC-NFS server or an SMB server running the NetBEUI protocol.
This problem occurs because of a conflict between the NDISHLP.SYS driver used by VREDIR and the PCNFS.SYS driver supplied by SunSoft for their PC-NFS client. The conflict causes network packets to be forwarded incorrectly, so no packets are broadcast on the network.
This problem affects only certain PCMCIA and Cabletron network adapters. The following network adapters are known to exhibit this behavior:
There is no fix at this time.
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Date: Thu, 07 Dec 95 10:15:00 -0800
From: Rich Graves <[email protected]>
Creative Labs has released a new driver to address general multitasking problems that cause data corruption and retransmission problems for both modem and LAN connections. These drivers are available from www.creaf.com and ftp.creaf.com.
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Date: Sunday, October 08, 1995 5:47 AM
From: Peter Court <[email protected]>
[I swear I am not making this up.]
We've had this fault on several different Toshiba's (incl with
the latest Win95 BIOS V5). We've reported to Xircom and
Microsoft PSS but had no response. Neither have attempted
to reproduce the problem as yet. We have not tried it on
different Laptops as yet.
Problem Symptom:
Error on bootup of Windows 95. Windows 95 startup screen disappears to
black screen with the following message
"While initializing device VREDIR
Windows protection error. You need to restart your computer"
This is a hard error and occurs every time (expect with stated workaround
below).
System Configuration:
Toshiba T4800CT with Xircom Token Ring Credit Card Adapter IIPS. Also
happens with Xircom Credit Card Ethernet Adapter IIPS. Using the standard
Windows 95 32-bit network drivers.
Network Settings:
Client for Microsoft Networks
Dial-Up Adapter
Xircom CreditCard TokenRing Adapter (All Types)
NetBEUI -> Dial-Up Adapter
NetBEUI -> Xircom CreditCard TokenRing Adapter (All Types)
TCP/IP -> Dial-Up Adapter
TCP/IP -> Xircom CreditCard TokenRing Adapter (All Types)
NetBEUI and TCP/IP are the Windows 95 supplied Microsoft versions.
Description:
It is desired to have NetBEUI on the Token Ring adapter as the default
protocol, and Client for Microsoft Networks only bound to the Token Ring
adapter (not Dial-Up Adapter). The only way I can get this combination to
start without the above error is to have the client bound to all installed
adapters (including Dial-Up), as well as having NetBEUI bound to the
Dial-Up adapter. I must also set TCP/IP on the Dial-Up adapter as the
default protocol. Any other combination of default protocol and bindings
causes the above error.
Adding a Xircom CreditCard Ethernet Adapter IIPS to the system while it is
running will load the relevant software and bind NetBEUI and TCP/IP to the
adapter ok. However, restarting the system with this combination causes
the above error. Removing the Ethernet card and reinserting after the
system has started is ok.
Work-Around:
Remove the Token Ring adapter from the system configuration under the
control panel. Setup the Dial-Up adapter for NetBEUI and TCP/IP with
TCP/IP as the default protocol. Insert the Token Ring adapter, which will
recognized by the PCMCIA controller and the software loaded. Add the
Client for Microsoft Networks and ensure it is bond to all protocols.
Ensure the Dial-Up TCP/IP protocol is still the default protocol. Restart
the system and all should be ok --- until you make a change, then you have
to reconfigure this workaround all over again.
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Date: Wed, 11 Oct 1995 23:53:38 -0700 (PDT)
From: Rich Graves <[email protected]>
[Contributions from Toyon RCC Chirag D. Khopkar.] This is either a hardware incompatibility with the Dell Advanced Port Replicator, or WINIPCFG is making up a hardware address for the dialup adapter (Dells ship with both Ethernet and DUN interfaces fully configured). More investigation is needed; email me if you've done any.
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Date: Wed, 27 Dec 1995 08:43:00 -0800
From: [email protected]
[In response to Andrea Brenton's problem of network applications causing crashes in various DLLs and GPFs in USER.EXE:]
POINTER.DLL. That's the problem. Move it and POINTER.EXE to another directory temporarily, preparatory to deleting them. Also edit WIN.INI and remove the reference to POINTER.EXE from the load= or run= line.
The MS Mouse Intellipoint drivers from Win3.x are not fully compatible with Win95 and cause "interesting" problems in several areas. Apparently they have a strong tendency to interact with network-related software. We've had to remove them to get MSPSRV (attaches workstation printer to Netware print queue) to work without putting two error messages on the screen at the beginning of every print job.
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Date: Fri, 29 Dec 1995 21:44:00 -0800
From: Rich Graves <[email protected]>
This has been reported with EFA-207, 3Com 3C589, and an IBM Token Ring card on various ThinkPads, Toshibas, and Zenith laptops.
You probably either need to plug your PC into a live network (with termination or 10BaseT link as appropriate), or remove the PC Card.