The last few days we've been trying to install 5 windows xp home computers & one windows xp pro computer to a peer to peer network. We are aware of the 5 computer limit for xp home and that is why we purchased a seat with pro. We have also tried to network only 3 computers at a time with identical results. We are using tcp/ip. We've enabled netbios over tcp/ip. all computers have a share folder. all computers have guest accounts enabled. icf is not enabled & no third party firewalls are in place. Internet access is not a problem for any of the computers. They all connects to the internet immediatly through the gateway.
Setup: 6 computers plug into the hub which plugs into a router. Ip address' are assigned statically.

Symptoms: Sometimes a computer cannot login to the workgroup at all with an error message that says "Workgroup is not accessible. You might not have permission to use this network resource....The network path was not found" & then without even changing any settings certain computers will sportically work & not work. They sometimes can see each other, sometimes they can even access the share folders but never all of them at once. Every station can ping their own ip address & the router & sometimes other workstations, but that changes sportically as well.

We tested the network out with a windows 98 computer which would work perfectly, it could see & access all the xp computers & vice versa. Its just xp to xp will not work on a constant basis.

If anyone knows of a way to stop this nightmare please help. Anything that we can try? I mean...going into this we thought we knew what we were doing but obviously not...any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.