I was in a situation today where I needed to have some boxes talk to a local share on their box, while disconnected from the network. Who knew it wouldn't work out of the box (besides those who have tried before :). When you disconnect the network cable, windows decides that even local shares are inaccessible. This is a similar problem to the one Dave Burke had for his code camp 3 presentation. Had I turned to his blog first, I would have seen the reply from Robert Hurlbut on the loopback adapter, but I didn't, and found this post instead. Once I made the change to the registry, it worked perfectly (after a reboot that is).