The Mother of All Networking Problems

I figure I'll try and enlist your collective intelligences to solve this.

I'm doing tech support for a small retail sales business with a IT budget of $0. They are using an old Win 3.1 Point of Sale program running on a Novell server with a half dozen or so Windows 98 Client machines. The problem is that they've lost the original installation disks for this POS program and it's old enough to have reached the point that getting replacements is impossible.

So, if a client machine dies and needs to be replaced, or if a hard disk needs to be replaced, the only way to try and make it work is to use Norton Ghost or Maxblast or some such drive cloning program off a working client HD, install the cloned HD into the new machine, boot into safe mode, kill off all the irrelevant hardware and let it restart to see what happens.

So far, this method has led to cloned machines that boot successfully, connect to the network, and even connect to the internet. The problem occurs when you try and run the POS package, or accounting package or any software that requires writing to the network drive. That gives an error. I thought it might be permissions, but they are fine.

The only visible difference to me is that when you browse to the network drive through My Computer, right click on it and select properties...

- on a working client, it sees the network drive as a OS/2 drive, 3.5 gigs, 3/4ths full.

- on a nonworking client, it sees the network drive as a FAT drive, 1.99 gigs, 1.99 full.

Oddly enough, in the same properties window, if you click the novell tab, both client machines report the drive correctly as a 3.5 gigger...it's only the basic windows "piechart" properties screen that has this discrepancy. And I suspect it's this discrepancy that's causing the trouble.

What I've tried: Booting into safe mode and killing all the irrelevant hardware, not booting into safe mode and not killing the irrelevant hardware, reinstalling the Novell client 32, copying the vredir.vxd file from a working client manually.

Nothing seems to make any difference, and I'm out of ideas.

<local drives, of any size are seen correctly>.

Suggestions?