Phantom computer on network

I have 13 pc's networked in house. All use regular TCP-IP with no
homegoup allowed All but one of them is running Win7 in some flavour,
e.g. 32 or 64 bit. They all behave fine and network more or less works
as expected

A week or so ago, as I've often had occassion to do, I redid someone's
pc. In this case I did a reinstall of Win7 Pro on a fairly fancy pc, an
Athlon 6 core "something" running in the 3.5Gz range with 16 Gb memory
and in total 5 hard disks in unit. I did take out the PCI-IDE card which
dropped the hd number down to 4, all SATA.

After install which went very smoothly given Windows knew about every
piece of hardware (clean device manager, a surprise), I connected
network cable and started updating it, e.g. Windows Update. I gave the
pc the name AMD-SEPCORE as it showed 6 cpu's in device manager.

All went well and I took pc back to owner (which is a different story :
()

Problem is now when viewing Workgroup pc's an AMD-SEPCORE pc shows up
under a second "Computer" listing. You can do nothing basiclly with the
item.

Now I did nothing more with that pc than I have with literally a hundred
others over the years. None of the others have persisted in this way.

Anyone with any insight and specifically how can I get rid of this
phantom pc?

pjp wrote:
I have 13 pc's networked in house. All use regular TCP-IP with no
homegoup allowed All but one of them is running Win7 in some flavour,
e.g. 32 or 64 bit. They all behave fine and network more or less works
as expected

A week or so ago, as I've often had occassion to do, I redid someone's
pc. In this case I did a reinstall of Win7 Pro on a fairly fancy pc, an
Athlon 6 core "something" running in the 3.5Gz range with 16 Gb memory
and in total 5 hard disks in unit. I did take out the PCI-IDE card which
dropped the hd number down to 4, all SATA.

After install which went very smoothly given Windows knew about every
piece of hardware (clean device manager, a surprise), I connected
network cable and started updating it, e.g. Windows Update. I gave the
pc the name AMD-SEPCORE as it showed 6 cpu's in device manager.

All went well and I took pc back to owner (which is a different story :
()

Problem is now when viewing Workgroup pc's an AMD-SEPCORE pc shows up
under a second "Computer" listing. You can do nothing basiclly with the
item.

Now I did nothing more with that pc than I have with literally a hundred
others over the years. None of the others have persisted in this way.

Anyone with any insight and specifically how can I get rid of this
phantom pc?

The network browser protocol "remembers" machines that
have just shutdown and powered off. It may take some
period of time, or followup event, to clear it.

For example, if another computer acquires that IP
address from DHCP on your LAN, then the name will
undoubtedly be lost.

On a proper domain, a server keeps track of stuff
and is a "boss".

Whereas on a home LAN, the NetBIOS Browser election
process, nominates a standin for a domain controller,
and that machine then provides a list of machines
in the neighborhood. That's sort of the basic idea.

Elements of that protocol, have a ten or fifteen minute
time constant (the events are given a different color
in Wireshark, making it easier to see them). Browser
elections don't occur in a microsecond, or get updated
once a second. This is part of the reason that network
state information seems to change so slowly.

*******

You should take a screenshot of what you're seeing,
and share it with us. If you're seeing a separate
entry that is graphically separated from where those
are normally displayed. Perhaps the location of
the orphan will jog someones memory on the topic.

As an alternative, have a look at the pictures here,
and see if yours is similar.

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/...ork-resources/

One of the protocols on Windows 7, exists mainly
to draw the ball and stick picture of
Network Map. That blog entry doesn't include a picture
of that ball and stick model, to demonstrate.

You can see a Network Map example here. At one time,
you had to install SSDP as a separate step to enable
stuff like this.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc505886.aspx

https://i-msdn.sec.s-msft.com/dynimg/IC165996.png

Paul

In article , lid says...

pjp wrote:
I have 13 pc's networked in house. All use regular TCP-IP with no
homegoup allowed All but one of them is running Win7 in some flavour,
e.g. 32 or 64 bit. They all behave fine and network more or less works
as expected

A week or so ago, as I've often had occassion to do, I redid someone's
pc. In this case I did a reinstall of Win7 Pro on a fairly fancy pc, an
Athlon 6 core "something" running in the 3.5Gz range with 16 Gb memory
and in total 5 hard disks in unit. I did take out the PCI-IDE card which
dropped the hd number down to 4, all SATA.

After install which went very smoothly given Windows knew about every
piece of hardware (clean device manager, a surprise), I connected
network cable and started updating it, e.g. Windows Update. I gave the
pc the name AMD-SEPCORE as it showed 6 cpu's in device manager.

All went well and I took pc back to owner (which is a different story :
()

Problem is now when viewing Workgroup pc's an AMD-SEPCORE pc shows up
under a second "Computer" listing. You can do nothing basiclly with the
item.

Now I did nothing more with that pc than I have with literally a hundred
others over the years. None of the others have persisted in this way.

Anyone with any insight and specifically how can I get rid of this
phantom pc?

The network browser protocol "remembers" machines that
have just shutdown and powered off. It may take some
period of time, or followup event, to clear it.

For example, if another computer acquires that IP
address from DHCP on your LAN, then the name will
undoubtedly be lost.

On a proper domain, a server keeps track of stuff
and is a "boss".

Whereas on a home LAN, the NetBIOS Browser election
process, nominates a standin for a domain controller,
and that machine then provides a list of machines
in the neighborhood. That's sort of the basic idea.

Elements of that protocol, have a ten or fifteen minute
time constant (the events are given a different color
in Wireshark, making it easier to see them). Browser

Well it's not the Master Browser simply not timing out as quick as I'd
like. I'm very familiar with that scenario given number of pcs connected
in house and fact one of them eventually screws up if it's the master
browser so I know how to check etc.

Given the images on page you posted compared to what I see displayed.

I get the same "Computer" listing which shows all pcs currently
connected correctly.

I do not get any "xxx Media" pc based devices but that's I believe
because I turn that off on every pc so there are none. My IP camera
shows up as a Media Device though. My router shows up a "Network
Infrastructure" but there's no sign of any of the four switches used.

My IP Scanner software doesn't display anything I can't account for,
e.g. PC,s, IP camera, Blue Ray Player, Xbox(s) etc.

What I do get that I've never seen before is just under the "Computer"
listing there's a new to me catagory titled "Computers" (notice the
extra 's' at the end) and it's in this catagory I have this "ghost" pc
listed that is now no longer available.

Thought occurs to me as I write this to try and rename one of the pcs to
this "ghost" name and see what happens. If it allows me to do the rename
and get network connected then perhaps it'll just go away as per
normallly if I then change name back. I'll post if that works or not
when I have time to try it.

In article ,
says...

In article , lid says...

pjp wrote:
I have 13 pc's networked in house. All use regular TCP-IP with no
homegoup allowed All but one of them is running Win7 in some flavour,
e.g. 32 or 64 bit. They all behave fine and network more or less works
as expected

A week or so ago, as I've often had occassion to do, I redid someone's
pc. In this case I did a reinstall of Win7 Pro on a fairly fancy pc, an
Athlon 6 core "something" running in the 3.5Gz range with 16 Gb memory
and in total 5 hard disks in unit. I did take out the PCI-IDE card which
dropped the hd number down to 4, all SATA.

After install which went very smoothly given Windows knew about every
piece of hardware (clean device manager, a surprise), I connected
network cable and started updating it, e.g. Windows Update. I gave the
pc the name AMD-SEPCORE as it showed 6 cpu's in device manager.

All went well and I took pc back to owner (which is a different story :
()

Problem is now when viewing Workgroup pc's an AMD-SEPCORE pc shows up
under a second "Computer" listing. You can do nothing basiclly with the
item.

Now I did nothing more with that pc than I have with literally a hundred
others over the years. None of the others have persisted in this way.

Anyone with any insight and specifically how can I get rid of this
phantom pc?

The network browser protocol "remembers" machines that
have just shutdown and powered off. It may take some
period of time, or followup event, to clear it.

For example, if another computer acquires that IP
address from DHCP on your LAN, then the name will
undoubtedly be lost.

On a proper domain, a server keeps track of stuff
and is a "boss".

Whereas on a home LAN, the NetBIOS Browser election
process, nominates a standin for a domain controller,
and that machine then provides a list of machines
in the neighborhood. That's sort of the basic idea.

Elements of that protocol, have a ten or fifteen minute

Well it appears I've deleted the entry.

I put in a usb network adapter, connected it to network and then tried
to access the ghost device which got me to creating a profile for
something and once that was done the ghost pc disappeared. Removing the
wireless network adapter and device hasn't returned so ???

In article ,
says...

In article ,
says...

In article , lid says...

pjp wrote:
I have 13 pc's networked in house. All use regular TCP-IP with no
homegoup allowed All but one of them is running Win7 in some flavour,
e.g. 32 or 64 bit. They all behave fine and network more or less works
as expected

A week or so ago, as I've often had occassion to do, I redid someone's
pc. In this case I did a reinstall of Win7 Pro on a fairly fancy pc, an
Athlon 6 core "something" running in the 3.5Gz range with 16 Gb memory
and in total 5 hard disks in unit. I did take out the PCI-IDE card which
dropped the hd number down to 4, all SATA.

After install which went very smoothly given Windows knew about every
piece of hardware (clean device manager, a surprise), I connected
network cable and started updating it, e.g. Windows Update. I gave the
pc the name AMD-SEPCORE as it showed 6 cpu's in device manager.

All went well and I took pc back to owner (which is a different story :
()

Problem is now when viewing Workgroup pc's an AMD-SEPCORE pc shows up
under a second "Computer" listing. You can do nothing basiclly with the
item.

Now I did nothing more with that pc than I have with literally a hundred
others over the years. None of the others have persisted in this way.

Anyone with any insight and specifically how can I get rid of this
phantom pc?

The network browser protocol "remembers" machines that
have just shutdown and powered off. It may take some
period of time, or followup event, to clear it.

For example, if another computer acquires that IP
address from DHCP on your LAN, then the name will
undoubtedly be lost.

On a proper domain, a server keeps track of stuff
and is a "boss".

Whereas on a home LAN, the NetBIOS Browser election
process, nominates a standin for a domain controller,
and that machine then provides a list of machines

Nope, that didn't work. There's still a "Computers" catagory with the
phantom pc listed on all the pcs in the network.

In article ,
says...

In article ,
says...

In article ,
says...

In article , lid says...

pjp wrote:
I have 13 pc's networked in house. All use regular TCP-IP with no
homegoup allowed All but one of them is running Win7 in some flavour,
e.g. 32 or 64 bit. They all behave fine and network more or less works
as expected

A week or so ago, as I've often had occassion to do, I redid someone's
pc. In this case I did a reinstall of Win7 Pro on a fairly fancy pc, an
Athlon 6 core "something" running in the 3.5Gz range with 16 Gb memory
and in total 5 hard disks in unit. I did take out the PCI-IDE card which
dropped the hd number down to 4, all SATA.

After install which went very smoothly given Windows knew about every
piece of hardware (clean device manager, a surprise), I connected
network cable and started updating it, e.g. Windows Update. I gave the
pc the name AMD-SEPCORE as it showed 6 cpu's in device manager.

All went well and I took pc back to owner (which is a different story :
()

Problem is now when viewing Workgroup pc's an AMD-SEPCORE pc shows up
under a second "Computer" listing. You can do nothing basiclly with the
item.

Now I did nothing more with that pc than I have with literally a hundred
others over the years. None of the others have persisted in this way.

Anyone with any insight and specifically how can I get rid of this
phantom pc?

The network browser protocol "remembers" machines that
have just shutdown and powered off. It may take some
period of time, or followup event, to clear it.

For example, if another computer acquires that IP
address from DHCP on your LAN, then the name will
undoubtedly be lost.

On a proper domain, a server keeps track of stuff
and is a "boss".


Anyone got any ideas on what to search for in Google? All I get a very
generic results not pertinent to situation.

On 29/07/2018 06:26, pjp wrote:
In article , lid says...

pjp wrote:
I have 13 pc's networked in house. All use regular TCP-IP with no
homegoup allowed All but one of them is running Win7 in some flavour,
e.g. 32 or 64 bit. They all behave fine and network more or less works
as expected

A week or so ago, as I've often had occassion to do, I redid someone's
pc. In this case I did a reinstall of Win7 Pro on a fairly fancy pc, an
Athlon 6 core "something" running in the 3.5Gz range with 16 Gb memory
and in total 5 hard disks in unit. I did take out the PCI-IDE card which
dropped the hd number down to 4, all SATA.

After install which went very smoothly given Windows knew about every
piece of hardware (clean device manager, a surprise), I connected
network cable and started updating it, e.g. Windows Update. I gave the
pc the name AMD-SEPCORE as it showed 6 cpu's in device manager.

All went well and I took pc back to owner (which is a different story :
()

Problem is now when viewing Workgroup pc's an AMD-SEPCORE pc shows up
under a second "Computer" listing. You can do nothing basiclly with the
item.

Now I did nothing more with that pc than I have with literally a hundred
others over the years. None of the others have persisted in this way.

Anyone with any insight and specifically how can I get rid of this
phantom pc?

The network browser protocol "remembers" machines that
have just shutdown and powered off. It may take some
period of time, or followup event, to clear it.

For example, if another computer acquires that IP
address from DHCP on your LAN, then the name will
undoubtedly be lost.

On a proper domain, a server keeps track of stuff
and is a "boss".

Whereas on a home LAN, the NetBIOS Browser election
process, nominates a standin for a domain controller,
and that machine then provides a list of machines
in the neighborhood. That's sort of the basic idea.

Elements of that protocol, have a ten or fifteen minute
time constant (the events are given a different color
in Wireshark, making it easier to see them). Browser

Well it's not the Master Browser simply not timing out as quick as I'd
like. I'm very familiar with that scenario given number of pcs connected
in house and fact one of them eventually screws up if it's the master
browser so I know how to check etc.

Given the images on page you posted compared to what I see displayed.

I get the same "Computer" listing which shows all pcs currently
connected correctly.

I do not get any "xxx Media" pc based devices but that's I believe
because I turn that off on every pc so there are none. My IP camera
shows up as a Media Device though. My router shows up a "Network
Infrastructure" but there's no sign of any of the four switches used.

My IP Scanner software doesn't display anything I can't account for,
e.g. PC,s, IP camera, Blue Ray Player, Xbox(s) etc.

What I do get that I've never seen before is just under the "Computer"
listing there's a new to me catagory titled "Computers" (notice the
extra 's' at the end) and it's in this catagory I have this "ghost" pc
listed that is now no longer available.

Thought occurs to me as I write this to try and rename one of the pcs to
this "ghost" name and see what happens. If it allows me to do the rename
and get network connected then perhaps it'll just go away as per
normallly if I then change name back. I'll post if that works or not
when I have time to try it.



This extra icon.
Is it identical to the ones under Computer?
What's on it's right click menu?
What happens when you double click it?

--

Brian Gregory (in England).

pjp wrote:
In article ,
says...
In article ,
says...
In article , lid says...
pjp wrote:
I have 13 pc's networked in house. All use regular TCP-IP with no
homegoup allowed All but one of them is running Win7 in some flavour,
e.g. 32 or 64 bit. They all behave fine and network more or less works
as expected

A week or so ago, as I've often had occassion to do, I redid someone's
pc. In this case I did a reinstall of Win7 Pro on a fairly fancy pc, an
Athlon 6 core "something" running in the 3.5Gz range with 16 Gb memory
and in total 5 hard disks in unit. I did take out the PCI-IDE card which
dropped the hd number down to 4, all SATA.

After install which went very smoothly given Windows knew about every
piece of hardware (clean device manager, a surprise), I connected
network cable and started updating it, e.g. Windows Update. I gave the
pc the name AMD-SEPCORE as it showed 6 cpu's in device manager.

All went well and I took pc back to owner (which is a different story :
()

Problem is now when viewing Workgroup pc's an AMD-SEPCORE pc shows up
under a second "Computer" listing. You can do nothing basiclly with the
item.

Now I did nothing more with that pc than I have with literally a hundred
others over the years. None of the others have persisted in this way.

Anyone with any insight and specifically how can I get rid of this
phantom pc?
The network browser protocol "remembers" machines that
have just shutdown and powered off. It may take some
period of time, or followup event, to clear it.

For example, if another computer acquires that IP
address from DHCP on your LAN, then the name will
undoubtedly be lost.

On a proper domain, a server keeps track of stuff
and is a "boss".

Whereas on a home LAN, the NetBIOS Browser election
process, nominates a standin for a domain controller,
and that machine then provides a list of machines

Nope, that didn't work. There's still a "Computers" catagory with the
phantom pc listed on all the pcs in the network.

You could try nbtscan and see what it shows.



http://al.howardknight.net/msgid.cgi...nt-email.me%3E

http://www.unixwiz.net/tools/nbtscan.html

http://www.unixwiz.net/tools/nbtscan-1.0.35.exe

nbtscan 192.168.1.0/24

The idea being, to see if at some level,
the list is "normal". You'll need to adjust that address
and netmask, for the particulars of your setup.

*******

Some of the entries in the Explorer display,
can be removed by editing certain CLSIDs in the
Registry. There was discussion some time back,
about the removal of Library entries for example.

This isn't the best article on the topic, just the
first one I got in a search. Using a CLSID from
here, I found a bigger list of CLSIDs.

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/...e-cea9c6af8b2e

(A list of other CLSIDs.)

https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/...dows-10-a.html

There's no listing there for Computers that I can see.
And I don't know how many areas of the screen are
controlled by stuff like that. Or if that's the problem.
The Libraries removal, was removing "Libraries" from
the Explorer left hand sidebar.

Paul

In article , void-
says...

On 29/07/2018 06:26, pjp wrote:
In article , lid says...

pjp wrote:
I have 13 pc's networked in house. All use regular TCP-IP with no
homegoup allowed All but one of them is running Win7 in some flavour,
e.g. 32 or 64 bit. They all behave fine and network more or less works
as expected

A week or so ago, as I've often had occassion to do, I redid someone's
pc. In this case I did a reinstall of Win7 Pro on a fairly fancy pc, an
Athlon 6 core "something" running in the 3.5Gz range with 16 Gb memory
and in total 5 hard disks in unit. I did take out the PCI-IDE card which
dropped the hd number down to 4, all SATA.

After install which went very smoothly given Windows knew about every
piece of hardware (clean device manager, a surprise), I connected
network cable and started updating it, e.g. Windows Update. I gave the
pc the name AMD-SEPCORE as it showed 6 cpu's in device manager.

All went well and I took pc back to owner (which is a different story :
()

Problem is now when viewing Workgroup pc's an AMD-SEPCORE pc shows up
under a second "Computer" listing. You can do nothing basiclly with the
item.

Now I did nothing more with that pc than I have with literally a hundred
others over the years. None of the others have persisted in this way.

Anyone with any insight and specifically how can I get rid of this
phantom pc?

The network browser protocol "remembers" machines that
have just shutdown and powered off. It may take some
period of time, or followup event, to clear it.

For example, if another computer acquires that IP
address from DHCP on your LAN, then the name will
undoubtedly be lost.

On a proper domain, a server keeps track of stuff
and is a "boss".

Whereas on a home LAN, the NetBIOS Browser election
process, nominates a standin for a domain controller,
and that machine then provides a list of machines
in the neighborhood. That's sort of the basic idea.


No the "extra" icon is unique and only listed under catagory
"Computers" and not the catagory "Computer". It appears the item is
somehow connected to wireless device. I do remember using a USB wireless
dongle first on the before mentioned pc to find a driver for it's
onboard nic so I assume that's where the name of the entry came from.

What I don't understand is why it's persisting, days now. My laptops all
use wireless and they don't stick around after being shutdown nor have
any desktop pc that I've used the wireless dongle on before.

It also appears I'm somewhat stymied in fact pc doesn't have any
wireless so dialog boxes don't appear (I can't edit any profile whatever
that is as an example) because service isn't running kind of things.

Right clicking icon brings three choices, Configure, Create Shortcut and
Properties.

Configure gives an error message "Windows does not have any network
profiles for this device to use" and I can click on a "Manage Wireless
Network" which brings up an erro box informing me wireless isn't running
so no go there. The displayed profiles dialog is empty of any entries.
Model # is 1.0.

Properties gives me a "... Webpage unavailable" but does give me a
Unigue id and a Mac address (that doesn't appear right
00:16:44:99:23:f8) and no IP address.

I've been leaving the network dialog open while writing this and have
noticed the damn icon has appred and disappeared now three times, wtf is
going on with that??? It disappeared and a refresh brought it back?