What is a "network bridge"?

I was doing a favor for a neighbor whom just went wireless on a Linky 802.11b. The cards went in the pc's just fine, all was happy. On a Tosihba laptop, she had an onboard lan which was already factory configured and ready to use. When I plugged in the pcima card, XP recongnized and configured it, loaded it's drivers, and placed like 6 network connections in the task bar. When I went to my networking properties, there was a network bridge in the local network side, and a wireless conection, her username connection, and a local area connection. It wouldn't surf, and it wouldn't share. It also said I had more than one device using the same IP, and disabled the address. So I went into the device manager and disabled all the networking devices except the wireless card, and then removed the wirless connection and the username connection from the network bridge and all was well again. So what is this "network bridge" and how is it supposed to work? Any advantages to using this thing properly?

A bridge is a connection between two separate networks. If you have multiple network adapters in a computer (like your wired & wireless), you can configure them as a bridge so that traffic into one NIC gets passed through and out the other NIC.

I've never had Windows configure bridging automatically, so I'm not sure what happened in your situation. Under normal circumstances, you don't want it enabled.

S-Dog..

I hoped you'd find this thread. So the network bridge would be useful in a situation where you have dual lan like on the Asus A7N8X Deluxe?? Meaning, this would help you use the dual lan like a router, right? If this is true, could you not also control which traffic was passed on and which traffic was blocked? This could be useful for like Internet Connection Sharing and so forth? right?

I've never used Windows for Internet Connection Sharing or to perform any kind of routing or bridging tasks, so I really don't know offhand what Windows' bridging features can or can't be configured to do. (Sorry!)