After spending the past two months wading through the Vista Networking public newsgroup over at msnews.microsoft.com, I have come up with the following tips that will save the users from many problems:

1.  If you are having network access/connectivity issues AND you have a Norton or McAfee network security (not AV, but I won’t go there on that one) product, your issue is more than likely the Norton or McAfee product.  I haven’t been answering these questions as I made a conscious decision years ago to never let either of these software manufacturers near any computer system I own/manage.  However, there have been countless posts in which Norton/McAfee security products are either blocking communications altogether, or have otherwise made networking the PC’s virtually impossible.

2.  Make sure you disable network autotuning to get faster file copying/network access to other workgroup/domain computers.

This is easy, though.  Run the following command from a Command Prompt as an administrator:

netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

netsh int tcp set global rss=disabled

3.  If you can’t enable sharing, make sure that you have identified your network as Private.  If it is unidentified or Public, you will not be able to enable sharing (without hacking).

I would hazard to guess that these three issues probably represent about 50% of the issues on an average day.