Workgroup needs resetting on reboot

3 other computers on my network are XP and about a week ago win 7 stopped finding them. I've solved the problem but it's a nuisance.
Essentially I have to rename my workgroup to workgroup1 then wait for the popup telling me to reboot and then re-rename my workgroup1 back to workgroup and then reboot. The network will then work fine until the next time I reboot when I have to go through the whole workgroup renaming process again. Any ideas about how to get around this nuisance?

If you are trying to see the XP hard drives, try mapping drives on your Windows 7 computer to point to the hard drives on your Windows XP computers.


For example, let's say that your three XP computers are named "XP1", "XP2", and "XP3".

• The first thing you should do (you have probably already done this) is to go on each XP computer and share whatever you want to share with the other computers. For example, C:\, or C:\DOCS. Doing this will make those resources available to be seen and accessed by the Windows 7 computer.
• Now go to the Windows 7 computer, and open File Manager. Choose Map a Drive (I don't know where that is on the screen). Select an unused drive letter for each of the XP computer's hard drives (say, X, Y, and Z), and map that drive letter to the resource on the desired XP computer. And pick a share name that will be descriptive, such as "XP1-C", "XP2-C", etc.

After doing the above, you should have something like this on your Windows 7 computer:

• Drive X will point to XP1's c-drive, and it will show up as "XP1-C".
• Drive Y will point to XP2's c-drive, and it will show up as "XP2-C".
• Drive Z will point to XP3's c-drive, and it will show up as "XP3-C".

Now, you can access XP1's c-drive either by going to X:, or by going to "XP1-C", etc.

Thanks for your reply but I'm trying to sort out as to why some recent update has messed up the operations of my machine. It was working fine until about a week ago and now I have to keep going through the same routine everyday to get access that was previously not a problem. I just don't get why it can reset itself on reboot to not working but then work fine after changing a name and then changing it back again.
Previously it was fine. Now it's not.