As an IT Professional I do not service too many home clients. It is a decision I made a while back and with few exceptions I try to live by it, but we ALL have one or two clients who are friends of the family that we are obliged to help when they call, and for a reduced rate. I was at one such client this evening, for whom I had set up a simple peer-to-peer network for Internet and printer sharing. None of the computers could connect to the Internet, and neither of the laptops could print to the shared printer.
The Internet problem was of course a simple one - their wireless router's DHCP server needed to be rebooted, and poof they could all see the web.
Unfortunately that fixed one problem, but the printer was still not working. I recreated the share, but nothing was doing. It took several minutes for me to look at the print server and notice that the jobs were actually showing up there, then dying. I climbed under the desk to find one USB cable lying unplugged. It seems that one daughter's iPod had temporarily needed a port, and the printer never got reattached. I deleted all of the queued messages before reconnecting it. Lo and behold, I sent a test page and the printer wheels fired up.
This is a good lesson not only in computers, but in life. When we encounter a problem before going to look for complicated solutions first see if there is a simple one that will do the job. It might just save a lot of time and headaches!