Library found on ATV but will not load

Question

Have ATV hooked up via HDMI to TV with Optical digital audio cable connected to Pioneer Elite VSX-03 TXH
ATV connected wireless to router.
iTunes Library on wireless windows xp laptop
both connected to same/only router
I can watch Netflix, listen to internet radio, log into flickr.
After turning on Home Sharing on both my iTunes and ATV, I am able to see "Michael's Library" under the Computers tab. When I select "Michael's Library", I get the black screen that says 'Loading "Michael's Library"...
....and it just sits there for hours. Ugh not sure what the issue is. I tried turning off home share on both iTunes and ATV. Also tried unplugging ATV and plugging back in.
Broke down and talked to Apple. They said the issue was I didn't have SP3 installed for Windows XP. Thought that was a weird issue. Downloaded and installed SP3 and still having same issue.
Anyone have any thoughts on this issue?

Answer 1

I had the same problem driving me round the bend. In the end I changed two things and it now works fine. He's a description of my setup and what I did in case it helps anyone out.
Set up:
ATV 2nd gen in lounge as is the wireless router (Netgear DG834GT, 2.4GHz 802.11) at the other end of the room. iMac (10.6.5) upstairs well within range of the router.
Problem:
Same as described in this thread where the library is available but content will just hang when I try and select anything from iTunes library on the iMac. Accessing anything on the internet on ATV worked fine. Additionally, I'd occasionally be using ATV and go back to it an hour later and nothing worked - not even the internet - it appeared to have lost the network.
Solution:
a) The first problem with content hanging from iTunes in my case turned out to be interference from other wireless things in the house. I've a cordless phone that was in the lounge and also a wireless baby monitor in the same room. I simply switched them off to check at first that it was the problem, and turned them back on to witness the issue again - I can't remember if the interference was immediate as I was testing it out whilst doing other things. I'm not sure what channels the phone and baby monitor are on but played around with different channels on the wireless port of the router until I found one that didn't suffer from interference. I've not had any problems streaming from my iMac since changing this.
b) The second problem with losing the network I think was down to other computers and smart phones accessing the network. I was actually losing the network on the iMac end too, not just the ATV end. I think at one point whilst I was having problems there was another laptop and numerous smart phones accessing the wi-fi, all taking an automatically generated IP addresses. I solved this by giving the iMac and ATV a fixed IP address rather than letting them take one automatically. Essentially I left all the other DHCP settings the same and just changed the last digits on the IP address to something in the nineties e.g. 192.168.0.91 for the iMac and 192.168.0.92 for ATV. Since doing that neither of them have dropped the network so there's been no need to reboot the router etc.
Anything wireless these days just seems to get too complicated as there are too many variables... especially for a consumer device which you'd expect to just work out of the box.
Anyway, hopefully you'll find a solution as ATV really is pretty good when it works (I wasn't saying that a week ago!).