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["Calvin Powers" <calvin AT cspowers.com>]

Arrrgh, 

I'm having windows/netbios networking trouble again and it's driving me batty. Any thought/suggestions on what to investigate would be appreciated. 

99% of the time everything works fine. I have a linksys wireless router and a time warner cable modem. I have 4 machines on my home network, the tivo, a pda, a media machine, and my laptop. From a TCPIP perspective, everything always works great. All the machines can get out to the internet anytime they want. They all have addresses assigned by the routers. All is beautiful

My problem comes with Windows networking. My two computers are both in a work group called "CSP". TThe media machine is called CSPMEDIA and the laptop is called WALDENPOND. 99% of the time, waldenpond can access shared folders on cspmedia and it can print to the printer attached to cspmedia. I should note that waldenpond has both a wireless card and a wired connection. Most of the time, when at home I use the wired connection although sometimes I use the wireless connection. 

But every once in a while (like tonight when I really really need to get something printed in a hurry), all of a sudden windows networking gets completely broken. I have no idea what happens to cause it to go bonkers. The syptoms are: 

-- If I do a "show workgroup computers" on both machines, they will both show that they are teh only machines in the CSP workgroup
-- Any attempts by waldenpond to access cspmedia's shared folders result in "network path not found you might not have access" messages. 
-- Any attempt by waldenpond to print to the cspmedia printer results in "RPC server not running" messages. 
-- if i ping cspmedia from walden pond it resolves to some earthlink network address, not an address on my local 
192.168.* lan. 
-- if I get cspmedia's tcpip address and do a net use command with the address instead of the name it will work just fine. I can access the shared folders and I can attach and print to the printer that way as well. 
-- At some point in the future, it will all start working again. I have not been able to figure out what causes it to start working again. But at some point I'll be able to do net use commands with the machine names again. 

I can work around it with IP addresses, but honestly it's driving me nuts. I ought to be able to figure it out but haven't so far. 

One thing I would like to understand better is how windows networking translates machine names into TCP/IP addresses. Can anyone shed light on this? My current gut feeling is that that is somehow the crux of the problem. So when I tell waldenpond to net use * \\cspmedia\music how does it know where on the lan cspmedia is? 

Any advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated! 

Dumbfounded in chapel hill, 
Calvin