Question : Trying to network 2 computers & cable modem-win98

I have studied several questions posed by people having problems similar to mine, and have tried several suggestions already, to no avail. Here is a brief summary of the mess I'm in:

The goal was to network my two pcs (a celeron 400mhz upstairs and a pentium 166 downstairs) together and share the net connection from the cable modem. Here's what I have done so far-

-I installed a netgear EN104, a simple 4 port ethernet hub. I placed it by the upstairs pc and hooked both machines and the cable modem to it via cat5 cable. All the lights on the hub light up when the machines are on, indicating that everything is communicating with the hub

-I next went to the network stack and added netbeui on the downstairs pc, and was asked to install the win98 cd. I did and that went ok. I then added netbeui upstairs, and installed the same win 98 cd there. I got an error message stating that a certain file, called PROTMAN.DOS, could not be found on the cd. This is the win 98 cd that came with the upstairs machine (and was also used to install win  98 downstairs) This file is on my  hard drive, but not on the cd.

-Next I named the machines (upstairs and Downstairs) and gave them both the exact same workgroup name; and designated files to share.

-I went back to the network stack and gave the upstairs machine an ip address of 192.168.0.1, and the downstairs machine 192.168.0.2. Both were assigned a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0

The machines do not recognize each other. The upstairs machine can ping the downstairs machine, BUT the downstairs machine can't ping the upstairs machine. Also,  when I set the two ip addresses I lost my internet connection. When I return to the "obtain an ip address automatically" option the internet returns.

One other thing, the nic on the older machine downstairs is built into the motherboard. Perhaps it is no good? (how can I test?)

Any help from anyone would be deeply appreciated!
Thanks

Answer : Trying to network 2 computers & cable modem-win98

Did you get it up and running? If not you might try reinstalling your OS.  You may have some bug and/or corrupted files on your hard drive since you keep getting that message even though you  installed netbeui already.
Probably a longshot, but I would certainly give it a try. Otherwise the nic on the older pc could be bad. If you replace this, be sure to go into setup and adjust settings to  "turn off" the on board nic.