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This may be impossible to diagnose over the web. Try some of these things.

Pick a web site, any web site, determine its IP address by pinging the website name, create a host file on the W2K machine for that web site. When you cannot access the web try that specific web site with the browser. If it loads then your DNS provider is having problems. If it does not respond then you need to look internally first. I am a Cisco person and don't know anything about Cayman routers, but if it were me I would buy a small 4 port switch then connect the router to one port and the two PC's to two other ports. Check your network cards and cables to make sure they are OK. If you get too much errors/collisions/noise this could be causing your problem.

Do you have any type of Access Control Lists set up or other types of packet filtering, usage policy, or security in place that could be causing this?

Do you know for sure that you actually have internet connectitivy when this happens? Is any other type of traffic going across your DSL connection?

I'd thought of pinging a website, but wasn't sure how to determine the IP address. Your suggestion led me to ping www.freerepublic.com and lo and behold it returned an IP address. The next time it goes down, I will attempt to ping FR and see what happens.

I've got 3 clients in my department, only the 2 WIN2000 machines are experiencing problems. I tried swapping the cables at the router and bridge between one of the WIN2000 clients and the WIN98 client in my department, no change.

As you may have determined, I am very new to WIN2000 and am very limited in my experience with networking. Unfortunately, I am the go to guy here at our business. A call to our ISP was greeted with an automated system that was really no help at all, pretty much what I expected.

The installation of my home network and the network here went off without a hitch, negating the need for me to really familiarize myself with the intricasies involved in maintaining the systems.

I did find some entries in the event log that I believe coincide with my problems. They state:

"The browser has forced an election on network \device\Nbf_{device number} because a master browser was stopped"

I am trying to research these entries(Event ID 8033), but most of the hits I receive on searching are pretty high tech and would take some time for me to understand.

As far as access control, packet filtering, usage policy, or security are concerned, the machines are pretty much in the same state they were in "out of the box". To my knowledge, other than user ID's, no other restrictions have been intituted. The problems occur with a standard user log in or when I'm logged in as an admin.

The problem is exclusive to the 2 WIN2000 machines, no other clients in the business are experiencing any problems. They are all on WIN9x.

Thanks for taking the time to respond and offering suggestions. I will try to ping a website IP when the error returns and will report back. Thanks again.