I have a client that has been having an ongoing network issue that I cannot
figure out.

They have 6 XP pro boxes configured in a workgroup environment. These
computers will work fine for a few days or sometimes weeks and then one day
they will start their day and the netowrk will be working fine. Then all of
a sudden one of the users will open "My Network Places" and literally watch
all the listed items disappear one by one (normally they have 10 or so items
in the list) until all are gone. As the day progresses they typically will
have this happen on all their machines, but not always.

They have a network hardware firewall/router in place and up to date
Antivirus (Norton) and Antispyware (Counterspy) in place. There is no
indication anywhere of infections.

Solutions tried:

1) Verified all have the same Workgroup name
2) Verified all have different computer names
3) Verified we are using simple file sharing
4) Ping by IP address to different machines generally works
5) I attempted the fixes mention in KB 811259 entitled "How to determine and
recover from Winsock2 corruption"
6) Saw another KB that referenced changing a key from 0 to 1 and verified
that registry key was set appropriately on all machines.
7) Checked wiring

One thing that has tended to work to resolve the problem on one machine at a
time is to do the following:

1) Change the workgroup name to something random.
2) Goto the Nethood folder in the users directory under Documents and
Settings and delete anything in there.
3) Reboot
4) Change the workgroup name back to the original
5) Reboot
6) Wait 4-5 minutes for Network Neighborhood to refind the computers


This work around is tiring and I need to find the cause and solution to
this. Any help would be appreciated.

Chris