Hello Community,

I am running into problems configuring HomeGroup with my collection of Windows 8.1 machines.

I have 3 Microsoft Accounts:

1. Personal: first.last@live.com
2. Business 1: first@domain.us
3. Business 2: first.last@domain.com

I have these 3 accounts added on two machines:

1. Machine A: Personal/Business 1
2. Machine B: Business 2

All 3 have the same first and last name.  So, when all 3 join Homegroup, there is only 1 node in explorer ("First Last", with the icon being from the live.com account, for whatever reason), and 3 nodes under that with the machines the accounts are on.

The problem I am running into (besides there just being 1 node in home group, there should be 3 -- 1 per account, IMO) is that sharing libraries from Machine A\Business 1 does not show up properly in the Explorer of Machine B\Business 2.  For instance, if I share the Documents Library, it displays in the Machine B\Business 2's explorer, but when I double-click it, it doesn't do anything.

Furthermore, if I explicitly share Machine A\Business 1's Document's folder (not library, the folder), the folder does show up in Machine B\Business 2's explorer, but when I double-click it, it produces an error dialog saying it cannot navigate to "C:\Users\Business1\Documents".

It appears that when Machine A\Business 1 shares items, the shares are being logged into Homegroup as local resources, and not network resources.  So, when another user attempts to access them, they are being accessed with a local path rather than a network path.

Is this a known issue?  If so, is there a workaround/fix for it?

Thank you for any assistance you can provide,

Michael

Hi Michael,

I cannot repro your issue in my environment. Did the share from your personal account on Machine A work fine?

Would you please test if the share from your business 2 on Machine B work fine? Let me know your test results.

Meanwhile, lets try to recreate the homegroup and rejoin your computer to check the results.

If the issue only happened on business 1 account, please follow these steps to capture the behavior during the share and access process as you mentioned in your post by using Network monitor. If you find any error or unexpected communication issue, please post back the log.

Microsoft Network Monitor 3.4

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=4865

Analyzing Network Data with Network Monitor

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc723623.aspx

Hope these could be helpful.

Hi Kate,

Thank you for looking into this.  I should also mention that these machines are Virtual, being hosted on a Windows 8.1 Hyper-V host.

One thing I did not try was to restart my machines after making updates to my Homegroup settings.  This should not be necessary, but Homegroup does seem especially buggy/erratic when initializing and setting it up.  I should have time this weekend to look into this further.

Thank you,

Michael

OK,

I spent part of my time this morning (well, ok... ALL of my morning, heh) looking into this.  My suspicions around the problem stemming from the same first/last name were unfounded.  I was able to reproduce the same problem from multiple machines with different email addresses and/or different first/last names.  Here is a screenshot of what it looks like from a machine in an unexpected state: 

http://sdrv.ms/19thmva

As you can see, the nodes display, but there isn't anything below them.  Furthermore, right-clicking and selecting properties displays the error box that is presented in the image.

I suspect that my Homegroup settings are somehow corrupted across the network.  I would ideally like to find a way to "scrub" (or manually remove) all settings related to Homegroup from my machines and start over again.  Simply removing all machines from the Homegroup and creating a new Homegroup does not fix this problem.

Is there any guidance/tools out there to completely scrub a machine of any settings of Homegroup?

Thank you,

Michael

Happy New Year... Ping. B)

Still running into this issue.  Does MSFT not care about quality anymore?

It's even worse now as I have one account on a machine (with the same account name) that is referencing old machines that no longer exist!  I need to be able to reset/purge Homegroup somehow...

• Edited by Michael-DragonSpark 15 hours 11 minutes ago

It's even worse now as I have one account on a machine (with the same account name) that is referencing old machines that no longer exist!  I need to be able to reset/purge Homegroup somehow...

• Edited by Michael-DragonSpark Tuesday, April 14, 2015 4:10 PM