Finally, after over a year of this curse, I have managed to tame my personal chimera, my shrike, my nemesis. Since March 2002, my laptop’s 3com network driver failed to load in W2K intermittedly. The annoying part was, it didn’t do it all the time; it only did it once out of three boots. But when it did it, no IP is assigned, and trying to get an IP results in crashing ipconfig.
I finally traced it to a…bad network driver. But since 3com’s oh-so-dedicated software department have only released two drivers in the three years this accursed NIC has existed on this earth, I had to revert to a driver created in November 2000.
I’ve tested this new (old) driver for a few weeks, so far the problem has not reappeared. Looks like a keeper, folks. That’s what I get for listening to Windows Update.