Nope, the Realtek Lan on my motherboard is detected fine with a normal XPsp2 install, so the drivers must already be there. However now that I think of it I might have removed some of the old "dead weight" drivers from the source disk.

If the slipstreamed XPsp3 disk doesn't support a driver will it hang like that? I always thought it just skipped over unknown devices and left the lovely "?" in device manger.

Either way I took the long route and did a Sp2 install and spent the day installing updates and obscure drivers :P. I'm definitely going to make a custom Xpsp3 disk again for this machine as well as my others but without testing it further I get the feeling that tracking down this particular issue might be tricky.

I'm thinking of starting fresh with another slipstream, this time only taking out a few things (not drivers this time) and adding the essential drivers I need (m.b., audio, video etc). Hopefully I won't need it anytime soon, but my data backup is current and I can always take the long route again if needed.

An alternate idea is to troubleshoot this on my older machine. I don't use it for anything other than studio recording so it's super easy to test on. Maybe I'll try another custom install and see if I can replicate the network issue. If not I'm guessing it's the driver conflict with sp3.

-V