Windows 7 and XP network problems

I know this is a popular topic to post about and I have reviewed other posts on this site and others about this problem, but the described circumstances never fully match my own. I have a new desktop at work that runs Windows 7. There are up to 7 other computers in our office network, all running XP Pro. I had gone through the process of turning on network discovery and all the other things that I was supposed to turn on or off. All of the computers are on the same workgroup name. For about 3 days I could bring up Windows Explorer and click on Network and it would bring up the other computers in the network. After I came back from Thanksgiving, I all of a sudden couldn't see or access any of the other computers on the network. None of them showed up on the network map. I can successfully ping the other computers and can even pick up the media streaming from one of the computers. I just can't access the files on any of them. Any thoughts? Remember, this worked before and I have not changed anything since then.

Map the network drives to remote machine so that they show up in explorer and you'll never have use for a network map.

Try it and see what I mean.

For example:

\\remotemachinename\C$ for remote C: drive
\\remotemachinename\D$ for remote D: drive

etc...

Click the map network drive button above where you see your own C, D, etc...

Well, that ultimately ended up working, and it'll work just fine for what I need. Still bugs me that all of a sudden I couldn't see the other computers. Come to think of it, I think we had this problem before even when all the computers were running XP. Mapping the network drives was the only thing that really saved us a bunch of hassle. I actually tried mapping the drives on my W7 machine before but I think I had the server computer name wrong. Thanks for the help.

You could check services.msc by typing that in the start menu and hitting enter.

Look at

Network List Service
Network Location Awareness
Link-Layer Topology Discovery Mapper

services and see that they are set to auto and started too.