HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!
work resumed last monday after 3 weeks of holidays! sad to say, i was bedridden for around 1 week during christmas due to cough and colds. sigh...
yesterday, i was trying to print out a testcase to our network printer but i kept on getting a network location not found error! i can see a shared folder but not its contents. tried restarting the system (win xp sp3) for several times but to no effect. i checked the event logs but nothing strange in the trace either. then i thought that it could be the network issue as the DNS & DHCP server had just been re-imported into a new virtual host. so i plugged my laptop into a different network segment but still to no avail.
next, i decided to removed my laptop from the current windows domain, restarted it and logged in with the local admin account. then tried re-joining the same domain once again after renewing the ip address but still the result! grrrr... wtf! if i can't make this laptop join the domain, it would be a lot of trouble for me at work! so i tried updating the ethernet card's driver, but still the same issue. i was getting hopeless and decided to run a windows repair using the installer cd. it took me around an hour to run the repair re-installation. tried joining the domain after the repair but still that damn "network location not found" error message dialog kept on popping up! last resort was to reinstall the system but i don't want to as it will surely take me several days to complete the application installation and tune-ups. i was searching for ghost backups if i had (i couldn't remember if i had taken one either.) unfortunately, i found no ghost snapshot images among my backup hdds.
before resorting to re-installing the OS, it came to me to try uninstalling the ethernet device and have the system re-discover that new device. that's what i did now and the system properly detected a new device and asked for the device driver installation. i set the location of the driver and installed it. after that, i tried re-joining the domain, 10secs... 20 secs... of waiting; the error message did not appeared! 25secs... at last my laptop was able to join the domain!!! whew. that was a very simple solution at all! i should have done this before trying other things then!!!
really didn't kwow what caused this problem. i had tried looking for traces but got no clue at all... anyway, now that i know; it would be easier then next time!
btw, i saw several posts on forums having the same issue. it seems that most people resorted to reverting the previous snapshots or re-installing the entire OS. i hope that this will also serve as a reference to you if ever you'll encounter the same symptoms of trouble...