ISDN Site Woes

[DougL]

Hi
Bear with me on this long post, I work for the local council IT department, a colleague and I were given the job of upgrading an ISDN site at a local children’s home which consisted of three PC’s one acting as a site server and all PC’s running NT4. The fifteen staff there accesses the councils LAN through the ISDN to check their mail and use the net. Lotus Notes is the mail application and this is installed locally on each PC. Server is setup three partitions with the E partition having three folders, Common, Commonnotesfiles, and Users respectively. All folders are shared and the common is effectively the users T: drive (accessible to all) once a batch files loads on start up. The Commonnotesfiles is their X: drive containing the council Lotus Notes address book and the user’s folder sub divided into individual users containing data and profile folders. Data is shared for user (their home drive G which contains their Notes directory and the users can use the replicate function in notes to receive mail.
Council use Dell PC’s so replaced the server with a GX280 and re-imaged the two GX240’s all running XP Pro and Office 2003. Setup all the users’ accounts on the new site server setting appropriate permissions. Replaced old ISDN box with CISCO router. Because XP generates a lot of traffic disabled computer browser, messenger and DHCP in services. In gpedit.msc installed batch file to turn on router when user logs on and turn it off when user logs off. Also using a scheduled task to turn router off every 15 minutes (don’t ask me why council policy!!).
Problem: inconsistent i.e. when users trying to log on as it comes up with error saying the domain cannot be found, it won’t allow users to log on locally. If I disable services stopping and starting router and just leave it on then users are able to logon and logoff. My own thoughts are that the router does not activate in time for the users to access their accounts, in other areas the council are updating the ISDN lines to broadband and I have no idea as to why we are still using ISDN at this site. I have tried different permutations but have not been successful. Point to note is council still using NT4 domains but are R & D a 2000 domain and this site is connected to it as part of the R & D. On checking the phone traffic the calls have increased around 70% since putting the new system in, any advice would be appreciated. I have kept images of the old PC’s as a backup should I need to revert everything back as it was.