network bridge, help needed...

Hey there, i've got a dfi lanparty nfII ultra b motherboard which has got 2 lan connections on it. Anyways at the moment i just use 1 lan connection for my laptop, but as i'm in the process of building a second machine and a mate of mine often brings his laptop over for playing games and stuff, i've begun looking at trying to setup both lan connections to be used at the same time.

i've tried just issueing the 2 lans with different ip's but when 2 laptops are connected, the pc can see both laptops, but either laptop can see the pc but not the other laptop. thinking about it for a while, it made sense really and i thought of setting up a network bridge for the 2 lans and that should work. My problem however is that the pc can't seem to setup the network bridge, each time i try it fails with the following error:
An unexpected error occurred while configuring the network bridge.

the bridge appears and lan 2 is under that so it appears the lan 1 is causing the problem, when i try to repair the lan 1 connection i get the following error:
The Following steps of the repair operation failed:
Renewing the IP address.
Please contact network administrator or ISP

have reinstalled the network drivers but that does'nt seem to help. while writing this post i've just begun to wonder would Norton Personal Firewall have anything to do with this? i doubt it would effect it but i might try disabling just to see. anyone got any other suggestions how i might get this working? or is there any other way to setup the 2 lans so that when 2 laptops are connected all machines can see each other?

any and all help/suggestions appreciated.