Wireshark · Ethereal-users: [Ethereal-users] WinXPHome is active despite hybernate?

[Peter Marquardt <info@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Several times I've seen one of the Windows XP Home boxes in my home 
network "connected" and "active" in the LAN. The light on the NIC and 
the switch are _on_ like if the machine was not turned off at all. Today 
I concentrated on that machine with Ethereal and found it to send ARP 
requests and announce its NetBios name/workgroup. It is the only desktop 
PC with Windows XP Home, the Notebook when booted into XP Home and 
hibernating doesn't show that behavior and even my running and online 
Linux / BSD boxen are less "noisy" on the LAN when idle than the 
hibernating XP Home box. It's perfectly quiet though, when Windows is 
actually shut down.

Is that normal? I always thought hibernation is a suspend to disk 
followed by a power-off. (The machine also boots and recovers from HD 
upon power-on) If the OS isn't managing the NIC, who/what then?

confused
-- Peter