My computers don't like network threesomes

Hi, I have a bit of a situation I'm hoping someone can shed some light on.

In my house, I have a small home network that's made up of 3 computers. The router that connects them together is a D-Link DI-614+ wireless router (latest firmware update 3.43) but all the computers are hooked up through LAN connections and the wireless is only used occasionally with a Pocket PC.

There are 2 Windows XP SP2 machines that my dad and I use on a daily basis and then I have an old PIII-550 running Windows 2000 down in my basement that I access through a VNC server. On the PIII all I have installed is Windows 2000 and a bunch of peer-to-peer clients like Kazaa, Ares, eMule, BitTorrent and I pretty much just use it for downloading since our other computers aren’t always on and I don’t want any spyware to get installed on them. Anyway, the problem is that whenever this third computer is connected to the network, it throws the other computers completely out of whack. The internet connection times out and I get "Network cable unplugged" messages that pop up all the time. And its not like that computer hogs up all the bandwidth, I'm on a decent DSL connection that I can easily get 160-180kbps when it probably never goes over 75kbps.

Has anyone ever experienced this type of problem, possibly with this router? If so I’d be glad to hear more about it.

Thank you

 

The trash your 2K machine has probably picked up is very capable of completely hosing up the other PCs and can even give the router heartburn.

With really up to date AV and spyware protection, you might be able to keep your network clean and working but that list of P2P stuff can probably quickly infect even the most protected of systems.