W7 unable to see XP Pro systems in workgroup.
Hi. I installed W7RC a few months back and haven't had any major issues until last week. I have three systems on a small workgroup. 2 of them are simple XP Pro 32bit machines which my wife and daughter use. The third is the problem. My machine is set up for a 4 way multi boot between XP Pro 32Bit, Vista Ultimate 32Bit, Vista Ultimate 64Bit, and W7 RC Ultimate 64Bit. We have one printer which is physically connected to my machine and is shared through the network to the other two machines. I use a Netgear residential wireless router although I have had issues with people trying to hack in on the wireless so I am using 100BT Ethernet for all three machines and the wireless component of the router is turned off. And yes, this problem only appears when I boot to Win7 RC. Now here is the problem. I have the other two machines (XP Pro) set up on a workgroup. And until recently, I had the Win7 machine working fine on it. Then without warning one day, I had to reboot, and when it came back up, it could no longer connect to the network drives I had mapped. I opened my network places and things were definitely off. Neither of the other two machines were showing up, and they could not be reached manually. I checked every setting including making sure that the Win7 box was set to be on the same workgroup. It has no problem connecting to the internet, and it can ping the router just fine. it can also go to the router config screen using the my browser. The router shows all three machines as connected. I tried disabling everything which could possibly interfere like the AV and Firewall software. I even put the machine in the DMZ on my router. Nothing helps. Here is the odd part. The other two machines can see the Win7 box and copy back and forth from and to it without an issue. I have disabled UAC (the first thing I did when I installed Win7), made sure there is a guest account on the other machines, and nothing. The other machines can see each other fine as well. Unfortunately the Homegroup system (Which never should have been implemented) doesn't seem to play nice when trying to use a workgroup with other machines running other versions of Windows. Has anyone else had this issue and if so, what did they do to fix it. I have most of my 3D modeling fil;es stored on shared drives on the other two machines and it's a pain to keep having to run into the other rooms to manually copy stuff using the XP machines.
July 29th, 2009 4:19pm

Hi,I don't know if this could be related to something I reported in the network connections screen. If you go to windows explorer, right-click on network and select properties (opens the network and sharing centre). Now click on 'change adapter settings' and see what is listed as the status of the network adapters - I don't think it is the workgroup name.Another way to try and connect to XP systems would be to map a network drive to the XP shares (from windows explorer select tools then map network drive) and thentick to connect with different credentials. This might help to clear up if it is an authentication issue between the systems.
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July 29th, 2009 8:16pm

The Homegroup feature only works among Windows 7 computers. Can you access other computers by entering the IP addresses in Explorer address bar? If so, there should not be any network connection problems. In this case, I suggest that you check if Network Discovery is enabled. Also, check if NetBIOS over TCP/IP is enabled. The following article can be referred. Chapter 11 - NetBIOS over TCP-IPArthur Xie - MSFT
July 31st, 2009 11:59am

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