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Help for solving a XP home lan mystery

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MerleOne:
Hi all,

There is one thing I liked about XP, it's that it used to be easy to setup a small home network by just making all PC connected to the wifi router have the same workgroup name, by default MSHOME. 

I just installed a brand new Samsung NC10 running XP SP3 and this time, it doesn't work.  The NC10 doesn't see the other XP but the other ones see it.  The problem can also be seen doing the following thing :

I open a command window (execute cmd), then type net view.

On the NC10, I get an error message after 10-20 secondes : "System error 6118, the workgroup server list is not currently available" (translated from French).
On the other PCs net view immediately returns a list of machines, including the NC10, like
\\SamsungNC10\ ...

I have used Google to look for solutions but found no clear cause.  This is all the more surprising since it is a brand new machine that I have not already "tuned".

I'd like to know if any of you has already encountered a similar problem and would gladly like some advice on how to solve this.  Thanks !

Carol Haynes:
Try running the network setup wizard on the new computer. I have had similar problems in the past and that seemed to cure it. You can even export the settings to USB stick and apply those settings to every XP based computer on your network.

Shades:
Windows is kinda slow with refreshing the list of available LAN computers. Does your new system receive an IP number from a DHCP server somewhere in your LAN (likely your router will be setup to handle this function)?

If so, try the IP number (like this: \\192.168.0.xxx in explorer) on one of your 'tuned' PC's and see if you can get access to the new PC and/or get an overview of available shares.  That way you know if the basics are working right.

Updating of the list goes a lot faster when you also enable a WINS server somewhere in your network. Current routers do not require the use of WINS since it is old, but if you do use one, networking does seem to work smoother using XP and below. How Vista and Win7 handle networking is unknown to me, I only know that the software for networking has been adjusted and that in those cases the use of the wizards is preferred.

MerleOne:
Thanks !  I'll will experiment with that and let you know.  I forgot to mention something very strange : sometimes it does work, for a few minutes, then it is off again.  I also tried on someone else network with just one XP Home PC connected to a Wifi router (another brand than the one I am using) and I got the same result.  When I turned off the other PC, suddenly net view started to work again, giving as result only the NC10.

I have also seen strange error messages in Windows logs, that I'll try to post, they are clearly related to this problem.

BTW, I did try the network wizard several times, to no avail.  I didn't export the settings to other machines since they already network OK.  The challenge would be to solve this without changing the configuration of other machines.

Shades:
Can it also not be that there is a firewall active on the new PC?

After all, they come nowadays with (a lot of) crapware. Maybe one of those software packages tries to solve a problem that is not there.
Google told me that this error can appear because of firewall settings.

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