ITunes sharing doesn't fully reach across home

I am stumped and frustrated.  Visibility of shared folders seems erratic across my home, and across an assortment of devices.  Here's what we have:
MacBook Pro
iMac (multiple users)
Apple TV
Just rebooted everything and:
The laptop can see two shared libraries on the iMac.
The two users on the iMac can each see the other shared library on the iMac.  Neither user's iTunes can see the shared library on the laptop.
The Apple TV can only see the shared library from the laptop.  It cannot see either of the shared libraries on the iMac (as far as I can tell: at any rate, there's only the laptop library in the "Computers" item).
These are all using the same home sharing ID.  All still on Snow Leopard.  All have freshly-updated iTunes.
Anyone have any suggestions about how to resolve this?  Our family's main library is on the iMac, and it's a major inconvenience that we can't get at that library from the Apple TV, and that we cannot share to it purchases made on the laptop.
I don't even know how to proceed to try to diagnose the cause of this issue.
We will be pathetically grateful for any suggestions!
Thanks,
R

I don't see how that can be it, since everything that I am sharing is seen somewhere:
The laptop share is seen on the Apple TV2 and
The iMac share is seen by another account on the iMac, and on the laptop.
The key problem is that the iMac share cannot be seen by the Apple TV2, and can't see the laptop share (meaning that it cannot pull together all our media from all devices).
Until last night, the laptop wasn't able to see the iMac share, but I followed some instructions on other sharing failure discussions, and disabled IPv6 on the iMac and laptop.  I have no idea why this would help, but now the laptop can see the iMac's share.
I also blew away the iTunes preferences plist file on the iMac, another recommendation.
I still don't have any clue about why this problem is occuring, but I am inclined to think the fault is somewhere on the iMac's configuration, or possibly in our network, since all the failures "touch" the iMac.  Does that sound plausible?
Again, is there any way to simulate an iTunes connection from the command line, so that I could see error messages to help with the diagnosis?  Or is there something I should look for in the console?
Many thanks!

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