Ambra4 -just to let you know that all seems well now and PC's are connected and fine. The settings all seemed more or less OK. I did turn off the IPv6 as suggested, which hopefully helped.

I wonder if I tried to reconnect,initially, by trying to "create a Network" -from my Windows 7 machine? I have read that to create a Home Network you can only do so by using PC's that all have Windows 7 installed? All I actually needed was to connect to the internet with each and putting the fast ethernet switch back in may have helped.

Regarding the Windows.old file -I was following the instructions in last month's PC Advisor on how to "upgrade" from Vista Home Premium to Windows 7 Home Premium. It says (page 86 "Data discovery": Restoring your data is straightforward. Go to the C:\Windows.old folder, select Start, type C:\users and press Enter.

If you don't already have the c:\windows.old\users folder open, open it now.

You now have two Explorer windows open. The windows.old one, which we'll call the source, contains your data. The C:\users window (the target) is where your data should end up. For each user's folder, open the respective folder in each Explorer window (so that the source window is open to C:\windows.old\Users\yourname\ and the target window is open to C:\Users\yourname).

Make sure hidden folders are truly hidden. If you see and AppData folder in the target, select Organize, Folder and search options. Cick the View tab. Select "Don't show hidden files, folders or drives", then click OK.

Drag all the folders (but not the individual files) from the source to the target.

It then explains you get asked permissions etc. and to click continue generally.

I found this worked for me with smaller programmes and photos but not Office, Acronis and Diskeeper (the latter two's one year licence had expired, which might explain that).

It does not work with XP but with Vista Home Premium it should have done.

Anyway, all seems relatively well now and thanks again for your assistance.

Kind regards
L