Update on this -
I tried all that and still no joy.
I spent hours following all the master browser combinations as I felt sure it must be something to do with that - all the symptoms where there.
Because everything worked fine if you plugged in via the LAN then it was obvious it was something to do with the wireless..
The fact that the lappy was multi-homed seemed a possibility but Id disabled the lan - and even the wireless - even stripped out the mac addresses from my router and started afresh. Id also totally removed the wireless adapters and started afresh twice.
Anyhow chris brought his lappy round - fired it up and came across exactly the same thing.... only this time now we had
three separate domains - none of them seeing each other - all named MSHome and all correctly set up. - except no talk with each other.
Even chris was scratching his head at one point - the 12 mins was pointing towards windows browser and ARP.
So chris fired up Ethereal to see if we could see what was going on - at first nothing it all looked ok... then there was a lil blip from my router.
Yet the ARP tables looked ok from what chris could see.. messed around with the router settings for about 1/2 an hour, couldnt see anything specific... but something weird was going on for the router to suddenly announce itself.
So... last attempt set the router back to the manufacturers settings** and about 1/2 an hour later everything was up and running ok.
What had happened with the ARP table Ive no idea - maybe chris has had chance to understand more I dunno. But whatever it was, was continuing through a router reboots and a factory reset was the only thing that sorted it.
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** Factory reset wasnt un-eventful and I had about 15-20 mins of worry when I couldnt get any sync what so ever.
The router was rebooted that many times and failed so often to resync that I half expected to find my normally rock steady 8Mb with 7dB of attenuation this morning being on a stupidly low profile with interleaving applied.
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Thanks chris for the help - appreciated.
Bet you didnt think youd be sorting my network, when a couple of hours earlier we thought we were going to see
Evanescence.