My Network Neighborhood is EMPTY

[Marco Monti]

Hi all!
I have a network with 25 PCs with various Operating Systems (win 9x,
win2000, winXP), up for many years.
My problem is that now I don't see my computers in "My Network Neighborhood"
anymore... it's always empty!
The peculiar thing is that I can ping all the PCs and I can access the
shared directories in Explorer if I write \\MyPc\Temp on the address bar,
for example. After accessing the computer this way, the name of the PC shows
up in "My Network Neighborhood".
Can anyone help me with this? Could this be caused by some kind of virus?

Thanks in advance for ny suggestions.
Marco

 

[John Wunderlich]

I have a network with 25 PCs with various Operating Systems (win
9x, win2000, winXP), up for many years.
My problem is that now I don't see my computers in "My Network
Neighborhood" anymore... it's always empty!
The peculiar thing is that I can ping all the PCs and I can access
the shared directories in Explorer if I write \\MyPc\Temp on the
address bar, for example. After accessing the computer this way,
the name of the PC shows up in "My Network Neighborhood".
Can anyone help me with this? Could this be caused by some kind of
virus?

One computer on subnet is elected as "browse master". A computer
with a misconfigured firewall can cause browser wars on the network
and become the browser but cannot list the computers on the network
because the firewall prevents the broadcasts from being accepted and
enumerated. Check your network for such a machine and either
disable/fix its firewall or disable the browser service on that
machine.

HTH,
John

 

[Marco Monti]

Thanks John for this info... I didn't know this service existed... Anyhow, I
don't know why but after restarting the machines for the 100th time, it all
started working again!!
I will study up on this service now!! ;-))
Marco