Leopard not seeing Windows shares on a home network - one solution

I have a small home network with a MacBook Pro, MacMini and a PC connected by Ethernet and a MacBook and a Powerbook connecting remotely. Recently upgraded to Leopard and initially could see the PC in the sharing tab of the sidebar of the Finder window. This then disappeared and was not fixed by the 10.5.1 update.
I spent hours messing around and now seem to have fixed the problem to the extent that the PC now shows up in the sharing tab spontaneously and this survives a restart.
First I looked at the workgroup issue in the WINS tab of the advanced settings in the Network preference pane. This wouldn’t ‘stick’ and the solution (posted elsewhere) is to duplicate the location setting, delete the old one and then use the new duplicated one, then you can enter a workgroup name and it will stick. The Mac doesn’t seem to detect a workgroup and I only found what the workgroup name was later. There was a greyed out NetBios name for my mac however. I also made sure that SMB sharing was enabled in the options dialog box in the sharing pane, (if you disable AFP sharing and close the window with SMB enabled the message in the sharing pane then says ‘Windows sharing enabled’ if both AFP and SMB are enabled then Windows sharing is not mentioned)
I intermittently tried to connect to server on smb://192.168 etc. and I kept getting a connection failed dialog box.
Still getting nowhere, so went to the PC to have a look at that. Found the correct workgroup name by searching the help for “computer, name” and this directed me to find the computer and workgroup names. I went back to the Mac and put in the workgroup name but still no joy. Went back to the PC and looked at ‘my network places’ and sure enough the public folder on my mac appeared and if I put a file into it I could open it on the PC.
I then looked at the firewall settings on the PC (I’m using BitDefender 2008 total security) and set the Mac to be a trusted computer on the network. Went back to the mac and tried connecting via the connect to server dialog box and this worked!!! I was asked for my windows password and having put this in the shared folders on the PC appeared. The PC appeared in the sidebar with a generic icon and the IP address (192.168.etc) next to it instead of the computer name. However, after I ejected the PC to see if I could connect again, it suddenly popped up again spontaneously in the sidebar with the usual PC-type computer name, i.e. a name followed by a random seeming alphanumeric string. If I select the PC in the sidebar and then click on the ‘connect as…’ button in the Finder window the shared folders appear.
As I say this ability to see the PC has now survived a restart so fingers crossed. I can't say which bits of the above were the important ones but it did seem to work.
Maybe this might help others
Cheers
Iain

I recently installed Leopard and just today wanted to connect to one of my Windows machines. After a Google search and some forum browsing I did the following:
- System Prefs > Network > Ethernet > Advanced... > WINS > Workgroup
- entered my Workgroup name (WORKGROUP)
- clicked "Ok" then "Apply"
- Restarted
- Apple Key + "K" smb://192.168.1.1
- Authentication box appeared; I typed in my creditials
- Then I noticed that the finder sidebar had populated the "shared" section with my Workgroup computers (all two of them). Not sure if it was populated after the restart but sure it wasn't there before.
- Just restarted and the "Shared" section is still populated with the Windows workgroup machines.
I'm very glad this is working as I have the "no WiFi" bug.

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