Thanks again 4 replying. Right now im in knoppix 5.02 - im quickly typing this before i have to power off my modem again. I realised in ethereal ( using promisuous mode) that the router continually sends "who has" packets from 10.0.0.2 to 10.0.0.13. I also noticed that there were no replies.I also looked at the broadcast adress the router was broadcasting to and found that it had a mac adress of ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff i was really confused by this. Also when i tried to ping the bcast adress while the connection wa up and running 10.0.255.255. i didnt get any replies. however when i pinged that same address in knoppix 4.02 all the packets transmitted were recieved. I also pinged the bcast addressed 10.0.0.255 and 255.255.255.255 and had no prblems at all. My windows xp isnt up at al i did some madness with some .dll files and the system wont boot. i tried reinstalling but it says my hd has error so it cant install. So im stuck with knoppix.
Thanks again. im kinds busy so wil reply sumtime later