Excellent points, thanks.

Yes, I have cloned the drive. I use clonzilla. restoring the original HD from clone is a time saver, but it puts back an OS that will inevitably fail (if history repeats itself a 4th or 5th time). I need to know WHY it is messing up and how to fix it.

The connection is through ethernet cable to a tp-link router.
I doubt I can ping (don't know how) anything because XP insists that a network cable is disconnected. I have highspeed DSL from my cable supplier. The router serves 3 other computers that may or may not be on at the same time. None of the computers is set up to "talk" to any of the others.

ipconfig /all might give something.

I went into the fresh install I made on the small hard drive. It does not have all the software I use on the affected system. So it is cleaner.
I took some screen shots (camera) of the network settings and settings for the broadcom 4401 controller.

I will compare those to the settings on the affected system to see if they match up. They should.

Maybe also ipconfig /all on the fresh install and the affected install, could be interesting.

Thanks again!