Thanks Incredible. Trying a different cable was the first thing tried, then a different port, with no success. After seeing the ip conflict message and fixing the reserved ip address, the server was restarted prior to changing anything else. It did not fix the problem. Then I only changed the IP address and its now changed back. The behaviour is still identical to what it was before. The messages file does not complain about an ip conflict since that was fixed. So I haven't actually isolated teh problem yet, though it may have been triggerred by the ip conflict.