Clients resolving incorrect IP

I got a Win2K server with mostly 98clients and a few 2K clients, over the past few days the problem has gotten progrsively worse, users have to logon 3 or 4 times before the password is accepted and their network drives become unavilable and available again randomly during the day. Trying to ping the server from a client while the client cannot connect to a shared drive it resolves the server name to an incorrect IP address (and say 10min later it will be back to the correct IP,and back and forth, very unpredictable), I looked in WINS on the server and deleted all entries that contained the incorrect address, i cleared the cache on a client i took out his Wins settings, and still it intermitently resolves the name to an invalid address. My understanding of name resolution is the client first checks its cache, then Wins, then a broadcast, then the lmhost and host files respectively. My feeling towards Wins is I dont need it, so i dont mind disabling it, but clients still resolve incorrectly, could they possibly be broadcasting and receiving rubbish IP from other clients who are just as confused about the whereabouts of the server as they are? Would I need to get the whole network to shutdown and reboot again to clear out any cache? Or as a lazy workaround i could plug the aditional network card of the server into my switch and assign the rubbish address to this card.. HA! but that wouldn't be right.. If anybody has any ideas please help me out! id appreciate it!

Thanks

 

the server that you have, is it just a file server? DNS, DHCP, running static or dynamice assignments on any/all of your clients?

the incorrect IP resolution that you are getting, is it always the same? And when you get it on client A can you go to client B and get the same incorrect resolution?

Talking w/ a friend, he said that I may be thinking to "tech", could be somthing silly like a faulty or failing NIC, maybe a failing PCMCIA slot on your MoBo?

need more info, this is a really interesting problem.

 

Thanks Spiritwalker for the response, well i got impatient and downed the whole network completely and booted her up again and all clients logged on first time and I haven't found the incorrect resolution again, shweet!

Yea its pretty much just a file server, not running DNS or DHCP, it also serves as a terminal server, which i think is possibly where this problem started.. as I have 1 remote user that dials into our server and runs a terminal session, she has a static IP on her XP box, this static IP is the IP that my clients were resolving the servers name to (yea always the same IP). Dont know how this happens but anyways at the time this problem started one of our not so computer literate marketing guys was in that city visiting and I know he was trying to get on the internet from her pc before she came in, i reckon he stuffed it all up somehow.

Well im still baffled as to how this all happened, but its all working so no worries. Thanks