Sharing with windows, smb problems...

This is confusing and it's irritating me. If share via SMB is turned on on my mac, the shared drives SHOULD show up under network places on windows xp... WITHOUT having to manually add them. Sometimes, seemingly randomly, it works, and other times it just doesn't. I've had no folders show up at all, some but not all, or all of them. It's beginning to get on my nerves because I don't know what's causing it. Is it unreliability of smb or the windows machine? (I would never blame my mac ).

Also, the windows machine and all of it's shared drives reliably show up under shared in the finder sidebar.

ARGH..

Not sure if I should post my similar problem or create a new thread but here goes...

I also have a problem with sharing on Windows that is driving me insane.

I cannot even ping the Windows XP server, so I've got no chance of even seeing the shares!

I'm running Mac OSX 10.4.11 (192.168.1.100) and Windows XP Service Pack 3 (192.168.1.101) on a linksys router running DHCP. Windows can ping Mac just fine but NOT vice-versa.

I was originally getting "ping: sendto: No route to host" on the mac but after I turned off the windows firewall it changed to "ping 192.168.1.101 (192.168.1.101): 56 data bytes" and then just hangs.

The only response I ever get from ping is with the firewall turned off, if I reboot then directly after logging in under my username, there is a response for around 5-10 seconds, then it just hangs again.

I thought it might be my anti-virus software suite but when I disbale that it still doesnt respond.

I know it's a windows fault and this is a Mac forum, but it's Mac to Windows interoperability and I've got more chance of getting in a fix in here.

OK, problem solved. I noticed another thread on another site that mentioned a Cisco VPN configuration issue that was causing the problem.

When I checked my Network Protocols for my local area conection, I found a Check Point SecuRemote protocol for my VPN software and when I disabled it, ping started working from my Mac and my Router to the XP machine.

Apologies for clogging up this thread but maybe it can help somebody else before they go insane.