Problem with arp connecting through gateway

[John5342]

I have a network consisting of

an internet gateway/router with an ip address of 192.168.1.1

a winxp pro computer using ip 192.168.1.210

a linux computer with two nics one of which is connected to the internet router using ip 192.168.1.200 and another connected to the windows computer with ip 192.168.1.201 using a crossover cable

i have forwarding enabled on the linux computer and it has worked for a long time with another linux box in the place of the windows pc but for various reasons i have had to switch to windows and now i cant get the windows to connect to the rest of the network.

the windows has 192.168.1.201 set up as the gateway. I can successfully conect to the linux computer but cannot get past it.

after using a packet sniffer on the linux machine i have found that the windows computer was correctly using arp to discover the location of the linux machine (192.168.1.201) but then proceeded to use arp to try and find the internet router (192.168.1.1) which is of course not connected on the link layer and therefore fails. This appears to be wrong but as i dont use windows very much i have no idea how to switch off this behaviour. The ip packets should just be sent to the linux machine so it can handle the routing.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, John

[John5342]

Found the solution.

Scrapped windows and just installed an OS that has decent networking capabilities. It proved easier to get the windows only software to run in linux than to get windows to actually network using standard ip protocol.

I have always defended windows saying that it is not as bad as people think but starting to think otherwise.