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on the first pc when I go to 'View network computers.' It sees the second pc. I can't ping it though and I can't get to my files on that machine. And on the second pc all I can do is get out to the net. I can't see anything on my local network.
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1. Are you pinging by IP address or name? Can you ping from pc 2 to pc1?
2. Have you checked to see if you have inadvertently disabled sending netbios broadcasts on either machine? That would lead to not being able to see the pc on which netbios broadcasts have been disabled.
3. Have you used a packet sniffer such as ethereal to see what is happening at the packet level? If not install ethereal, it's free, and you should see netbios and arp broadcasts from both machines during a 5 - 10 minute ethereal capture session. If you don't then you know where to start looking.
You should also attempt to connect to the one machine you can see during the capture session. The packets between the two machines will not be encrytped and you should be able to see exactly what is going on. Microsoft's error messages aren't always very informative.
4. Make sure, if you are running static IP addresses that you haven't inadvertently put the two machines in different address blocks, i.e. 192.168.1.1 and 192.168.2.1 with 255.255.255.0 netmasks. If you do that you won't be able to connect between the two or ping between the two either. You can also lose connectivity in your situation if you inadvertently use different subnet masks on the two machines. That places the two machines in different logical networks and without each having a gateway to the other's subnet they can't communicate. I've done that one to myself when I first started playing with networking concepts and it confused me for a while.