Chemxxx,
When you say you can ping from one XP box to another, do you mean by friendly (NetBIOS) name or IP? If they can ping each other at all, then that's a good indication that the firewall isn't up and you have some sort of connection available (I have seen some improperly wired/damaged connections that will still ping but not do anything else). On another note, you wouldn't happen to have been playing around with IPSec, would you?
Koffeeman,
The reason for your Network Neighborhood issues is due to your Master Browse list and flaky name resolution/handling system. This more than likely has nothing to do with what you have done, but it is an inherent problem with using NT-based OSs on a peer-to-peer network. Normally, these systems use WINS (Windows Internet Name Service) or at LEAST some sort of internal DNS (which only starting working semi-decent in Win2K for corporate-strength name resolution) and these servers would report the name, IP, and resourse listing to the Domain Master Browser (most senior Windows machine on the network, usually the PDC in NT4 and a DC in AD) for future resolution. You may have seen/heard/read information about deleting a key that is used by Windows to search for Scheduled Tasks on the remote machine before processing any shares and other resources and returning the information to you. This type of problem doesn't show up when:
A. It's a Win9x peer-to-peer network with no NT machines on it, or.
B. It's a Win9x and/or NT network but it has at least one WINS/DDNS box on it
In your case, you have WinXP boxes that declare themselves to be Master Browsers (they are the senior-most machines on your network) which is why you can see other machines from them, but they may force "elections" to determine who is in charge and may also not be able to get and cycle all the information from the other PCs on the network (hence the sketchy listings you sometimes get). So, how do I fix this? Well...
1. For slow browsing, save this string and all text as a .reg file, and then merge it:
|-----Start Here-----|
REGEDIT4
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\RemoteComputer\NameSpace\{D6277990-4C6A-11CF-8D87-00AA0060F5BF}]
@="Scheduled Tasks"
|-----End Here-----|
If you ever want to reinstall the key, just remove the "-" sign in front of "HKEY..." and then merge it again.
2. If possible, use static IPs for all of your clients and then use the LMHOSTS file (%systemroot%\system32\drivers\etc) and edit it as shown in the example. Then, remove the .SAM extension and you will then be able to resolve computer names off of that file..
3. If you always leave at least one of the WinXP boxes on, then you can disable the master browser functionality of the Win9X boxes so as to reduce election storms and some of the odd name resolution behavior that you may have been experiencing.
This should get you in the right direction, and help you out a long way in getting the machines to be more stable with each other when using NetBIOS name resolution. These tips, of course, go on the assumption that:
A. You have NetBIOS over TCP/IP enabled on all workstations, and
B. You can't use WINS since you don't have NT server installed on any machines on the network
If you have any other questions, please let me know. I hope you are still awake...