[Bungleau]

First thoughts... get rid of the networking wizard. It seems to be doing more harm than good.

I run DHCP here (dynamic IP) on all computers; the routers, printers, and Linux server have fixed IP addresses. Why? Well, I consider those to be fixed reources that everyone uses. Everything else can just come in wherever it wants to. I have had intermittent problems with a Win98 client not being able to see other computers, but those computers could see it. Those eventually went away.

If I were to solve this, I'd start back at the beginning. What's your network look like? I expect you've got a router/firewall of some kind connecting you to the outside world, and then all the computers connected to that. If that's not the case, please describe your physical layout.

Assuming you're there, the next thing is to make sure the router is properly connected to the outside world. I generally poke around on it and look for things like WAN IP addresses and so on. If all the computers can see the router and the outside world, then it's just an internal setup problem.

In my environment, the router is serving as the DHCP server. IOW, it assigns the dynamic IP addresses for all the computers. The computers can be either fixed or dynamic, so long as the same IP address isn't used by two machines. I had a problem at a customer two weeks ago where I was suddenly using the same IP address as someone else. Turned out it was an XP box that went back to a previous restore point... apparently, the IP address was restored as well.

Make sure all computers belong to the same workgroup or domain. This is set up in Network properties. They don't *HAVE* to be the same, but I've found it to be easier. Be sure to give them different names as well (set up in the same place). It makes it easier to know who is who.

Once all that seems to be done, go into Explorer and click on Network Neighborhood, then Entire Network. Don't use the wizard... [img]smile.gif[/img] On my machine here, it goes from Entire Network to Workgroup (my workgroup), and then to the individual machine names. From there, it goes to the shares on the individual machines.

This is a good place to figure out where you are having problems -- how much of this chain can you see?

My brain is frying, and there are too many permutations from here. Give this a shot, and respond back with specific spots and error messages or problems.