…the Network Control Panel.
Hmm. Well, I’m the administrator. I did no such thing. My laptop at home, which is connected to my hone network (and a member of my NT domain) is refusing to let me change its IP address.
I should know this… but I don’t. Where is the setting that undoes this policy?
I have admin rights to the domain controller.
http://compnetworking.about.com/library/tips/blfaq010.htm
"Computer Networking FAQ #10
Why is my Network Control Panel disabled (and how do I enable it)?
From one of our readers:
Q. “Every time I try to go to the Network section of Windows Control Panel, a message appears saying ‘Your system administrator disabled the Network Contol Panel.’ What does this mean and what can I do about it?”
A. A tool called System Policy Editor controls this behavior. People who set up networks, like system administrators at a school or small business, sometimes like to use System Policy Editor to prevent the users from changing operating system settings that they feel should be left alone for safety or security reasons. This tool (among its many other uses) can disable access to the Network Control Panel as described above.
To regain access to Network Control Panel on a computer, one must make appropriate changes through System Policy Editor (SPE). Microsoft does not include SPE with the default Windows setup, but SPE can be installed from the appropriate Resource Kit. On a Windows 98 CD, for example, SPE can be found on the CD at \Tools\Reskit\Netadmin\Poledit [1]. "
etc
Try deleting the following registry key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Network\NoNetSetup
or just set the value to zero.
Er…
pmh, trying to run REGEDIT also tells me that my system administrator, that rat bastard, has disabled registy editing.
OK, I made up the rat bastard part.
astro, that path doesn’t appear on my ME CD. I checked my old 98 CD, and sure enough, there is a POLEDIT directory and executable there - however, there’s no .POL file to edit on the laptop.
Any other ideas?
I have a .reg file at work that fixes this(both of them). If you still need it on monday I can email it to you.
I think your 1st mistake was intalling WinME in the first place, its sooooooooooooooooo ummm, rubbish? 
- stick with 98
bdgr, thanks - but in a frenzy of fury I have reformatted the disk and I’m reinstalling ME.
This problem wasn’t the only reason, although it was the straw-that-broke. This laptop was a hodgepodge - I had 95b on it, upgraded to 98, and again to ME; it was in the office for a while and attached to the corporate network - undoubtedly that’s when some helpful minion decided to make it conform to the company standard of you-can’t-change-anything. It had two FAT16 partitions, rather than one big FAT32, and this is a good opportunity to fix that, as we as get rid of the usual detrius that accumulates over years of installing and un-installing programs.
Thanks for the offer, though - I do appreciate it.
Given your laptops history cleaning it out is the very best thing you can do.
Per some other responses ME is a perfectly good OS, especially with respect to networking. I run 98SE on this machine and ME on my kids and office machines and ME’s CYA features (like rollback etc) are a lot nicer than anything 98 has to offer. I keep this one on 98 because I have to goof around with DOS stuff occasionally and 98 still boots to real mode DOS easier than ME.
Good luck.