I had a funny problem at a customer site yesterday where he had a small office setup with one of the PC's effectively running as a server (using simple folder sharing) and 4 other computers accessing it wirelessly.
Scenario:
Three of these PC's running Windows XP SP2 and two running Vista SP1. Three hardwired using ethernet and the others wirelessly.
Problem:
There definitely seemed to be a gremlin in the works when trying to browse the network from any or all of these PC's. :( They used to be able to see each other and share files and printers, but it was apparently intermittent and had stopped working completely this weekend. Some of the PC’s share files but others just read files. The error message in question was: “[PC/Folder name] is not accessible. You might not have permission to use this network resource."
I must admit to scratching my head for a long time and playing around with various network settings but to no avail. Luckily searching the internet (with my new and very sleek IBM Thinkpad Z60T over Vodaphone) I found what seems to have been a very simple solution.
Solution:
There is a service which runs on each machine called Computer Browse Master