ah man, that brings back memories.
Factor in a bit of troubleshooting time. mum always laughed that me and my friends would spend first few hours troubleshooting and that after I'd moved out my brother and his friends were up and running in a few minutes.
The difference was they were running WinXP and we were running dos/win9x dual boot systems. Probably didn't help that 2 out of the 3 of us liked to tinker with our systems in between lan parties though.
IPX is pretty reliable I can only remember 2 common issues.
People simply cancelling rather then hitting enter at the windows password screen on boot
Sometimes we had to manually set the frame type as 802.3 for everyone to see each other.
What games you going to play? If I can have lan parties of my own I'll live my life through for you for now