Solved.
Here's what I've done:
First of all, I've found out that same freeze happens when I disable and re-enable the driver directly via device manager, so I've uninstalled the driver. I know that it would be sane thing to pursue right away, but it wasn't my first choice of action because the NVIDIA's firewall is moody piece of work without poking around the drivers it depends on.
After that I've hit the "scan for hardware changes" and the freeze happened again, only this time (after the reboot) there were no more freezes after the re-enabling the LAN. I guess it was a driver issue.
The usual traffic was still missing, (0 packets after a boot + other PC invisible in the workgroup) although the connectivity and accessibility was normal. I've fixed it by creating the Network setup disc on XP side and running it on w98 side.
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Solved Threads: 45
Posting Virtuoso
Offline 1,985 posts
since May 2006