Windows XP Home file-sharing issues

Hi,

The other month my desktop computer blew up..I mean it fried everything
except the hard drives. So, still wanting access to my media drive, I stuck
the thing in a spare computer in my basement and activated file sharing on
it. At first, the access was just generally slow and buggy, stopping a lot
of times mid-transfer of files or, when i'd try to access a file, Windows
would hang. As it turns out the wireless connection was not enough to
transfer files (although it worked when pulling stuff off the second laptop
on my LAN), so I switched it to a wired connection and for a while, it ran
fine..but then I started getting a LOT of the exact same problems..and wound
up getting the error about no more connections. Both the PC with the media
drive and the laptop were running Win XP Home.

After a RAM upgrade in my laptop I started running Vista because, well, it
was actually running somewhat decently. I thought that SOME of my problems
would go away, but if anything, they've only gotten worse. I'm still getting
"Connection Limit" errors at least once or twice a day. Sometimes it'll
happen while i'm using it, other times it'll be after I've stopped using it
for a few hours and attempt to use it (such as getting up and going to work
and then coming home).

I know XP has a 5 connection limit...but seriously, how many connections are
created when streaming media off the thing? I'm the only person who accesses
the machine so I can't for the life of me figure out why my connections
would be maxing out; but it *NEVER* fails, every day it'll hit connection
limit and i'll have to reboot. Other times before it hits connection limits
it makes me wait 45 seconds to a full minute before serving the file...and
today, I just got a "Network Error" when trying to connect to the drive,
meaning I have to walk down to my basement and reboot a perfectly working
machine just so I can continue to have somewhat-buggy (but somewhat working)
file sharing.

I've tried all the registry tweaks I could find , and several people i've
spoken to can't figure out why I'm having these issues..so i'm bringing it
here? Why is file-sharing on my network acting like such a joke? What can I
do so I don't have to crawl over to the closet the machine is in every 14
hours to reboot it?

After a few hours of tinkering..I fixed my own problem. IRPStackSize in the
lanmanserver was set to 15, which i was sure i had increased...setting this
to 50 helped. I also used the little hack for tcpip.sys and increased the
connection count to 50.

"Jay Moore" <dewdude@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:BEB10CB3-A069-4EB0-9623-D2092A573074@microsoft.com...
> Hi,
>
> The other month my desktop computer blew up..I mean it fried everything
> except the hard drives. So, still wanting access to my media drive, I
> stuck the thing in a spare computer in my basement and activated file
> sharing on it. At first, the access was just generally slow and buggy,
> stopping a lot of times mid-transfer of files or, when i'd try to access a
> file, Windows would hang. As it turns out the wireless connection was not
> enough to transfer files (although it worked when pulling stuff off the
> second laptop on my LAN), so I switched it to a wired connection and for a
> while, it ran fine..but then I started getting a LOT of the exact same
> problems..and wound up getting the error about no more connections. Both
> the PC with the media drive and the laptop were running Win XP Home.
>
> After a RAM upgrade in my laptop I started running Vista because, well, it
> was actually running somewhat decently. I thought that SOME of my problems
> would go away, but if anything, they've only gotten worse. I'm still
> getting "Connection Limit" errors at least once or twice a day. Sometimes
> it'll happen while i'm using it, other times it'll be after I've stopped
> using it for a few hours and attempt to use it (such as getting up and
> going to work and then coming home).
>
> I know XP has a 5 connection limit...but seriously, how many connections
> are created when streaming media off the thing? I'm the only person who
> accesses the machine so I can't for the life of me figure out why my
> connections would be maxing out; but it *NEVER* fails, every day it'll hit
> connection limit and i'll have to reboot. Other times before it hits
> connection limits it makes me wait 45 seconds to a full minute before
> serving the file...and today, I just got a "Network Error" when trying to
> connect to the drive, meaning I have to walk down to my basement and
> reboot a perfectly working machine just so I can continue to have
> somewhat-buggy (but somewhat working) file sharing.
>
> I've tried all the registry tweaks I could find , and several people i've
> spoken to can't figure out why I'm having these issues..so i'm bringing it
> here? Why is file-sharing on my network acting like such a joke? What can
> I do so I don't have to crawl over to the closet the machine is in every
> 14 hours to reboot it?