NetBT Troubleshooting, windows XP

I had a problem where my DHCP Client and TCP/IP Helper services were not starting. The root cause of the problem is that they depend on another service (NetBT) which was not starting either.

I discovered this by testing with a command line program called nbtstat which lets you look at your netbt info. When I ran it I got this:

> nbtstat -n
"Failed to access NetBT driver -- NetBT may not be loaded"

There are lots of tips on the web that tell you this happens when you uninstall Norton Antivirus, and you need to remove a registry reference to SYMTDI or NISDRV (http://www.cit.cornell.edu/helpdesk/win/nav/navinternet.html)

However, this was not the case for me - I did not uninstall Norton Antivirus. All I can think of is that I recently ran a bunch of tools from Steve Gibson's Freeware page (http://www.grc.com/freepopular.htm). There are lots of really great, free tools there, but some claim that they are not tested on all OS. Of course, I'm not blaming Steve... but it seems related.

Anyhow, the SOLUTION turned out to be this - the registry entry for NetBT was telling it not to start (value 4) and I changed it to automatic (value 2) as follws:

start->run->regedit
HKLM/System/CurrentControlSet/Services/NetBT
Set "Start" tag equal to 2

Hope that helps some other poor soul with the same problem.

Completely solved my NetBT problem

Thanks Bill. I too had run some of Steve Gibson's tools. (It was No Share that did the dirty deed.) No criticism of Steve or his tight programming; I should have been more careful and heeded his explicit warnings. Anyway, resetting the start tag for the NetBT service in the registry did the trick.