Vista Causing Wins Entries To Change IP Addresses

Hmmm.....interesting.  I wondered the same thing.  I will try this.

Nope, that wasn't it.  Still when I took the browser service down on the vista machine I went into the wins manager on the server and saw all these machines change their ip to this .47 which is the vista address. I didn't mention this Wins server is on NT.  

Any other ideas?

Try manually adding the wins server into the TCP configuration on the Vista box.  Should be under advanced settings.

The machine is gone for the day, I was going to try this yesterday, but did an ipconfig /all and the wins server was already listed, so it shouldn't matter if I manually specify it, correct?

With the Computer browser service turned off, the machine shouldn't be responding to WINS requests at all.  Even if it is, WINS is simple enough that the Vista machine could be the master browser while it is there, and when it leaves the network, a new election should be forced automatically setting the server back as the WINS server.

Did you mean with the computer browser service turned off on the vista machine, it shouldn't be handing out these addresses?  Also, the problem I found with the service off is that the addresses still show wrong in the wins list, even when I flush the wins entries it still shows future machines with that .47 address.  Is there a time limit on when the master browser changes hands?  The reason I ask is because I turned off the computer browser service, then flushed the wins entries and then restarted the vista machine and we still had the problem.  

I am also going to check the wins server log to see if there were any log entries indicating an election won by the vista machine.

Strange thing is, I just hooked up another vista machine, which also has ultimate, but without service pack 1 on it.  It had both the browser service on and netbios over tcp/ip enabled and it isn't causing problems.  I don't get it.

Also, another strange thing is that I cannot view the network, like you could in xp by going to network neighborhood on this latest vista laptop which isn't giving me these wins issues.  But yet, the problem laptop I had yesterday could see all the computers/servers by clicking on network, but it had to have the netbios over tcp/ip enabled, which this new vista machine also has on.  Don't understand that one either.

If the browser service is turned off the machine should not be participating in WINS elections, it will also not be able to browse the network, but will be able to connect to resources you manually enter.  

As for the other laptop, by default Vista will not browse the network if joined to a domain, as it uses network discovery, a new protocol, by default.  It will find other Vista machines, but not 2k3 servers or xp machines.  If you go to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922120  you can download the link layer discovery topology server for xp.  Not sure if it works with 2k3.

Welcome to the wonderful world of Vista  

On the bad vista machine, here is the exact error in the System log:

The name "PFWHOME   :0" could  not be registered on the interface with IP address 10.185.10.47.  The computer with the ip address 10.185.10.3 did not allow the name to be claimed.

.3 is the wins server
.47 is the problamatic address being assigned to the vista machine, which is named admin-pc

I see a bunch of these same errors on the vista machine with the only exception is that it has different server or client names.  PFWHOME is our domain controller.  Even reading this I can' t make out what it means.  It is like it is trying to take all the machines on the network, their netbios name and registering it with 10.185.10.47 address being assigned to vista.  Could this be a problem with the network discovery feature?  I tried disabling the computer browser service with no help.

Found a whole lot of suggestions at http://www.eventid.net/display.asp?eventid=4321&eventno=1822&source=NetBT&phase=1

Have you tried disconnecting the machine from the domain and rejoining using a different name?

Yeah, I have been looking through those this morning.  Still going through them.

The machine is not part of the domain either.

None of the solutions on the page helped.  The only thing I can tell so far is that two other vista machines run fine and do not have this wins issue.  And, both of the machines that worked did not have SP1 installed.  The problem vista laptop does have SP1 installed.  

I will need to check any antivirus/firewall settings, but I doubt that would have any impact on this situation.  I even excluded the .47 in hopes something was configured  for that address and it did the same thing with the .53 address it received.  The other machines started changing their ip's to the .53 address in the wins entries. This is all with the computer browser turned off.  Arghh!!! I am at a loss.

I am assuming that the laptop has a different name than all the other machines on the network.

Correct, it has a different name then all the rest of the machines.  I read that one too.  

Anybody else?

Found the answer, it was a service called advanced networking service, which belongs to somebody by the name of Singleclick systems.  I know for sure this service is used by a Dell application for remote management, but it must do other things.  Once the service was stopped, all issues ceased.