Thanks for the tips! I found the "Browser Monitor" program.
There is one Master Browser and one Backup Browser on my LAN. Niether of them are multi-homed.
(When I double-click on my Master Browser, the details show it as a master AND a backup browser. The backup browser is only a backup. I dont know if this is normal or not.)
With this Browser monitor, I can see that SOME of the time both Browsers can see 42 "server" on my network.
As I watched closely yesterday, I learned that the Backup Browser periodically changes and sees only 5 servers. This corresponds to my computer only seeing 5 pcs in Network Places.
This change, from 42 to 5, back to 42, etc, happened several times yesterday, even though neither machine was rebooted or tampered with in any way.
The event log on both machines have no mention of an election, other than the one time that I manually restarted the browser service on the Master. (Which did not make the problem go away)
The event viewer on the backup browser does show this error:
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Event Type: Warning
Event Source: BROWSER
Event Category: None
Event ID: 8021
Description:
The browser was unable to retrieve a list of servers from the browser master \\JDMAX on the network \Device\NetBT_Tcpip_{BCBFEBC0-E69B-4464-AE53-B3D5A70FFA88}. The data is the error code.
--------------------------------
But, this message occured 12 minutes ago, yet it can still see all 42 server and my pc can see all the network.
The message repeats many times, but doesn't seem to sync with periods of poor connectivity. I can't find any errors that do sync with the problem.
So does anyone have a clue as to what I can look for next?
Sincerely, Max Vincent
Maxatronic Systems