No more connections can be made to this remote computer

Hi folks,

I've got a networking problem that's left me banging my head against the wall.

First though, this is a workgroup with the following machines:

Computer 1: Windows 7 32-bit used as a peer-to-peer file server, app and DB server, designated network browser, inbound VPN server (MS VPN)
Computer 2: Windows 7 64-bit used as a workstation
Computer 3: Windows 7 32-bit used as a workstation
Computer 4: Windows XP SP3 used as a workstation
Printer/AIO: Brother Laser, network-attached

The problem: Computers keep appearing and disappearing off the network except for the computer #1. In other words, on all the other machines, when you go into Windows Explorer and click on "Network", sometimes only one machine shows up; at other times, all machines show up. Mapped drives work without fail - it is just the network browsing that is unstable.

When only one computer is showing up in the list, if you issue the "net view" command, you get the message, "No more connections can be made to this remote computer at this time because there are already as many connections as the computer can accept."

I'm not sure what is eating up all the available "connections". I thought that Windows 7 allows 20 network connections, i.e., 20 computers on a LAN.

I found a machine that was joined to a non-existent homegroup, and turned that all off, but it had no effect. I've temporarily turned off any firewall rules (F-Secure) that I thought may be interfering with this, but no effect. I've also looked at the lanmanserver registry keys and I'm not seeing anything other than stock settings.

I need some help. Thanks.

Besides getting the error or not seeing the machine, what do you want to do that you cannot do?

Thanks for replying.

We can't navigate to shared folders that are not mapped as drives. I've had to directly map quite a few shared folders as drives to allow the users to do their work.

I wouldn't think there are any limitation of this sort. Not sure about file and printer sharing via Homegroup but network mappings (access to shares on PC1) does not have any limitations. At work when have network shares for all to access, no worries.