Marc you might also double check your cabling (in fact even change them). There is no cabling between the two systems. Both LULU and DUSTY are virtual systems running on the same ESXi hardware. At least that's one issue I don't have to worry about. :-) I'm still thinking it has something to do with Personal Alpha's network handling. I know that they play funny games between promiscuous mode and regular, and since I did set the Windows network adapter to have the right hardware address for DECnet, it's not using promiscuous mode, and perhaps it's not recognizing some of the multicast packets. That's a silly thing to consider, but I imagine it's possible. I suppose it's also possible that DUSTY isn't able to send out the hello packets. That I could find by snooping quite easily. I wonder whether Wireshark on the virtual Windows system would give me a decent idea of what DUSTY is sending out... or at least what LULU /could/ be seeing. --Marc