Metwork Problem

[hatab]

Hi Guys, i wonder if anybody can help.

the problem i have,

pc's that conect to my network are sometimes unable to see network shares on other machines and its doing my head in.

scenario

i have cable modem in to a hardware firewall (smoothwall) to a switch, off the switch is win2000 server sp 4, 3 desktop machines all running xp pro sp2 and a laptop xp pro sp2.

the server is out of the box nowt special loaded, it is basically just a file/print/authentication server with a couple of users setup, the only additional software loaded is bitdefender AV.

sometimes all the machines can see each other and everything is fine, but other times some of them dont want to play.

As a hareware person i have changed all network cables and originally had a hub but now i have a switch, i have also replaced network cards and got the latest drivers. i have tried static ip's run dhcp from the firewall and dhcp from the server.

today i had the problem. the server and firewall were running, i started up computer A B C the server can see all the machines on the network and can explore to all the shares no problem

computer A can see itself and the server but when i navigate to computer B i get a reply that says \\B not accessable you might not have permission to use this resource, contact admin. and when i try and navigate to C after 30 seconds or so it asks for a user name and password once i put in this info the i was able to access C and retrying B that worked ok too.

while ive been trying to sort this out ive been using 1 account (the same) on the 3 machines, to try and illiminate permissions problem.

after i had the above problem i downed all machines restarted server and logged on to each machine and it all worked.

also 1 other thing the clients seem to take an age to log on i timed on of the machines 2 mins 15 seconds from inputing the username and password to having desktop with all icons.

any help gratefully recieved

hatab

[eyeball]

you say you tried using the same account on each machine to eliminate permissions as a possible problem, but did this user have domain admin rights?

if not make the user a member and try it again, i fail to see no reason why it shouldnt work

[hatab]

yes user account i am using is a member of Administrators and domain admin (primary group)