Problem with Network service, Win 7

So I have a problem that cropped up and I checked this with my other Windows 7 machines. My system is a Windows 7 64-bit Pro. The problem is as of the past 3 months I noticed that when I click on Start > Network my system would take a long time to scan my network. I checked my settings and compare those to my other Windows 7 machines and those match.

My machine has the exact same parts on another Win7 machine and that one does not exhibit this slow issue. I ran the SFC /scannow and no issues there.

Then I found some notes I had written some time ago and I went poking around and found something. In the services, my "Computer Browser" service was set to "Manual" like all my other machines. But the status was stopped whereas all my other machines the status is "Started". So when I forced it to start, this got back to normal. When I rebooted the status was "Started". But then I reboot again and it was stopped.

So is there a fix to this service? I did check the associated file against my other systems and they are the same version and dated the same. So not sure why this is happening, all computers have the same Microsoft updates as I keep a log of which ones are installed.

If anyone can shed some light on this it would be appreciated.

To change the startup type of a service, right-click on the service, select properties and change it with the drop-down menu labelled "Startup Type" at the pop-up. If it's "manual" and you want it to start when Windows starts, change to Automatic, although in your case it's better to change it to Automatic Delayed. That simply means it will start after all Automatic services have started first.

Thanks doctore. I was playing with that, but I came across other threads on this; even in here and there does not seem to be an answer to this behavior. I did set it to Automatic and I manually started it. About 13 minutes went by and I check on it and the service was stopped. I rebooted and checked and it still was stopped, even when set to Automatic.

Reading from other posts I know I am not the only one.

There are different fixes, but non are working for my situation. I tried a Microsoft Fixit when I did a search for this same issue and nothing. I also discovered that my DEP was greyed out so I could not select anything there, but another Fixit took care of that where I can now select an option. I checked the logs and nothing popped out associated to this nor are there any entries when it does stop.

One answer here at the Seven is to do a repair install, but trying not to go that route.

Thanks again for the reply doctore, still going on to try to fix this. Anyone else had success on fixing this?

Sure thing.

Some services, even if set to automatic, will stop if there i nothing for them to do, so it's not really a suspicious behavior.

Last time I checked my Computer Browser service, it was set to "Manual (with Trigger)" although right now it's just Automatic. Unfortunately, I am not knowledgeable with triggers, but you can read on it here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/lib...=vs.85%29.aspx

To me it seems that the service should have a trigger, maybe when you connect to a network, but again - out of my realm.

Good luck