XP laptop no longer sees other PCs on network

[mhl]

I have a network consisting of 2 XP Pro desktop PCs, an XP Pro laptop and a NAS drive for storage. They connect through a Netgear router, the laptop wirelessly. Initially everything worked fine. Lately, however, the laptop has been unable to see desktop #2 and today it can no longer see desktop #1 either - although it can still see and connect to the NAS drive and the internet.

I don't know if it is just coincidence but I had the laptop connected to a different wireless network yesterday while travelling - although the fact remains that it can see my home network OK, just not two of the devices on it.

Any suggestions how to fix things?

Edit - have now connected laptop to network via RJ45 / Cat5 cable - and it still cannot see the two desktop PCs.

[mhl]

Well, I finally got to the bottom of this problem - and pretty obscure it was too.

For some unknown reason, my laptop seems to require LMHOSTS for NetBIOS lookup to identify the other PCs on the network. (If you don't know what this is, you may prefer to remain in ignorance, or you can investigate http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/l.../bb727013.aspx and scroll down to NetBIOS Name Resolution. The LMHOSTS setting is tucked away in Network Connection >> Properties >> TCP/IP >> Properties >> Advanced >> WINS). The LMHOSTS file is a simple text file which lists the IP addresses of the other devices on the network. Unfortunately, in my case, these IP addresses no longer matched the IP addresses which were allocated by my router - despite me having the router set to "address reservation", it is allocating random IP addresses. Once I edited the LMHOSTS file to match the IP addresses allocated by the router and rebooted the laptop, it can once again find all the mapped drives on the other PCs.

No idea why the laptop requires LMHOSTS and the other PCs don't. I suppose I can avoid this happening again by disabling the DHCP server function in the router and assigning fixed IP addresses to all the PCs.

[jdc2000]

Thanks for the update.