well, thanx Roni.
you got me to thinking ( usually a bad thing ! ) and i changed things around.

while doing so, i went to grc.com to to scan things.

these machines are behind a hardware firewall and i used his ip agent thing and it showed me the 192.xxx.xxx.xxx IP, but also showed me a 169.whatever ip that you were telling me about.

i then configured ZA to allow that IP

and i'm off and running

not sure i could repeat it, but the network is up and running.

i really needed to get a large file that was on the other pc onto this computer. its there now.

this one is running XP, the other is running W98/W2K dual boot. i have the network working in 98. now i need to see if i can get it going in w2k, which i vastly prefer.

again, thx.

scott