ASUS A8N-E LAN problem.

I had the same problem when I built my rig last month or so..it would not work until I installed the drivers.

Did you by any chance have the network hooked up when you loaded XP?

When I installed windows, I did not have the nic hooked up yet either. I had the same exact problem you did.

I finally got net connection when I connected BOTH nic's to my router. I don't understand why, but once I did that, it worked.

A bit after that, I realized I had installed the wrong HAL, so I simply did a complete reinstall of XP. This time I had my net connection hooked up (but only 1 nic). XP auto found configured it.

HAL = Hardware Abstraction Layer.

I don't have actual network cards either. I use on board ones. My board (yours also?) has two nic's on it.

For some reason, when I first hooked everything up, I could register the connection, but not actually use it. When I hooked BOTH network cards up, it would let me use it. I then removed one of the network cables and it still worked. I have no idea why....

I did not research into it any more. Hey, it worked, so who cares 8)

However, like I said, I had to reinstal XP, this time I had one of the cat 5's connected to the network interface. XP set everything up for me then...