Date: 01/23/09 (Computer Help)    Keywords: no keywords

We have a small home network which is a mixture of PCs and laptops and all the computers run XP Pro.

Three of the PCs are in effect 'new'. Two are out and out new and a third has been freshly installed. All updates are the most recent, i.e. SP3 and its various updates.

Our problem is that none of these PCs can see or connect to the network. They can all happily access the net (via a router) and the other computers can see and access these PCs, but they cannot even see themselves in Network Neighbourhood.

We've run the 'Set up small home network' wizard (several times); they all have the correct network name, but for some reason they simply can't access the network as such.

We're both fairly computer literate and are used to setting up and maintaining the network, these aren't the first new computers we've added and we've never had this problem before. And it isn't just us; our neighbour (who in fact supplied the two new computers) has had the same problem with another two news ones.

My theory is that it is something to do with XP SP3 - as it's the common factor between the two new machines and the one we reformatted. I think that somehow it's fine if your computer is already hooked up to the network and talking to it (all the existing computers are up to date as well with SP3), but if you download all the updates on to  a clean machine before the network has been set up something in SP3 is causing a problem. But I just do not know what.

Our network is very important to us, and whilst the new machines can be accessed via our other computers, that really isn't a solution to the problem. We've got to the stage where we are going to roll the non-brand new one back, take off SP3, get the network set up and then reinstall SP3. It's the only thing of which we can think.

However, before we do that (I really am loath to lose the various programs I've already installed on one of the machines) I thought I'd ask here is anyone else has come across this problem or if anyone has any suggestions as to what we might be missing/what we could do. If we'd never done it before, I could understand missing something, but it's something we've been doing for several years.

Can anyone help, please?

Thank you in advance.

NB. I am about to log off for the day so I won't be able to answer any possible additional question/suggestions until tomorrow.

Source: http://community.livejournal.com/computer_help/949744.html