So, I'm having a bit of an issue that appears to be affecting all the computers on my home network (XP pro x64 SP2, XP Home SP2, XP Home SP3, XP Pro SP3). Everything has been running fine for the past year or so that I've been in the home and then all of a sudden, within the past few days, this issue hit. I cannot connect directly to any of the shared folders on my network via the My Network Places folder. There are no longer any shared folders showing up there. I try to manually search the network for shared folders by opening Entire Network->Microsoft Windows Network (slower than normal here to find my workgroup, WORKGROUP)-> WORKGROUP. Once I try to open my workgroup, it waits for awhile and then I get the error: "Workgroup is not accessible. You might not have permission to use this network resource. Contact the administrator of this server to find out if you have access permissions. The list of servers for this workgroup is not currently available. ". Note that all my PCs are in this workgroup. Internet is working fine on all computers, and I can access any shared drives I've got mapped (or enter the network path into Run and open it up) and can ping other PCs on the network, so I don't think there's any issue with network adapters, and it's happening on 4 separate computers with different network adapters so it's hard to believe they all got corrupted somehow... The only thing I can think of is that I have automatic updates enabled and perhaps MS released an update that caused this issue. Has anyone seen/heard anything like this? Any ideas what could be causing this or how to resolve this? Any steps to try? This isn't a critical issue, as I mentioned I can still access shared folders, just need to map them or something, it's just frustrating that something which used to work find just stopped, all of a sudden, with no good reason, and everything I can think of that's related still seems to be fine... Thanks in advance!

HiMaybe this can Help, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/825826/en-us Jack - Microsoft MVP, Windows Networking. WWW.EZLAN.NET

Thanks for the reply. I'd actually already found that page via prior research and tried some of the suggestions on there on several of my computers (no luck). The problem however, is that this page is for missing network connections and that is not really my issue. My network connections show up fine, it's just the shared network folders that don't show up in "My Network Places". I can still access them directly (map the path to a folder, or enter path into "Run"), but I don't have the ability to browse the network anymore.

Thanks for the reply. I'd actually already found that page via prior research and tried some of the suggestions on there on several of my computers (no luck). The problem however, is that this page is for missing network connections and that is not really my issue. My network connections show up fine, it's just the shared network folders that don't show up in "My Network Places". I can still access them directly (map the path to a folder, or enter path into "Run"), but I don't have the ability to browse the network anymore. ***Just wanted to note that the issue appears to have resolved itself, across all computers. No idea what caused it or what fixed it but it's all working fine again. Thanks Jack for trying to help!