Mac to PC networking OSX to XP Sharing

[JimWatkins]

When I first ran my new MacPro with Leopard, it automatically found all the windows shared machines on my peer to peer network. Niftily in the tool bar of all finder windows..a sharing menu and a subset detailing all of the machines. All was well.

Yesterday, this vanished.. :-( It seems at boot up my mac puts the feelers out and comes back unable to decipher a response. I suspected cabling but internet and e-mail are fine (getting there through hubs and a common router). I used the connect tool in the OS and manually put in the IP address of a particular machine "smb://192.168.1.10" This worked.. and I could browse its shared contents. Alas.. at reboot - it vanishes once more and I have to repeat the process.

Is there a way I can restore leopard to finding and displaying the networked pc's at startup?

All help gratefully received.

Jim

[Satcomer]

Has anything changed on the network? Also you may want to bookmark the web site MacWindows.com (especially their Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Cross-platform Issues reader reports & fixes).

[JimWatkins]

The only change was the uptdate of leopard from 10.5 to 10.52... I've trawled the site you mentioned.. and built a workaround from the myriad suggestions on offer. I think I know more about this fix now than Apple themselves..

Thanks for your pointer.

Rgds

[Satcomer]

I also came across the Apple document Mac OS X 10.5: Hard drive disappears from the Finder. Plus a very interesting posting in Apple Discussions that might have some good hints.

I hope you find an answer. Good Luck.