Homegroup - Seen and Not Seen

I have 5 computers in my Homegroup, 2 Desktops (D1, D2) and 3 Laptops. D1 and the laptops are all running W7 Home Premium, D2 is running W7 Professional x64. All computers see all others, with one big exception - D1 sees D2 but D2 doesn't see D1 in the Homegroup. I ran the HomeGroup troubleshooter on both with no joy.

When I run Network and Sharing Center -> See full map from D2, I see the following:

D2 --------Switch --- Gateway --- World
| |
D1 -- 3 Laptops

From D1, I see the same map with D2 and D1 switched - basically the same map.

From D2, when I open D1, I see the individual shares (not listed as libraries) including "Users"! If I drill down, i.e.
Network -> D1 -> Users -> Me -> AppData -> Roaming -> Microsoft -> Windows -> Libraries
I see all the Libraries normally shown in under Homegroup. If I click on a Library, I see all the contents.

This ruled out the Netgear Switch and Netgear Router, and network hardware in general.

Initially, I had set up the Homegroup from D2 when this problem appeared. I deleted all the computers from the Homegroup, and created a Homegroup on D1 with different password, and re-joined all computers to the new Homegroup. Same Problem. Windows Update is on and all updates installed on both machines.

I then installed W7 Pro X86 on D2, and booted up that install - same result again.

My next attempt will be to install W7 Home Prem on D2 and see what happens, but before that I wanted to throw it out to the group and see if anyone has any ideas.
My wife's desktop is also on the LAN but she won't let me upgrade it to Win 7 yet.

Any help here would be much appreciated.

Thanks for your response chev65!

Unlikely that that is causing the problem, as D1, L1 and L2 in the HomeGroup have no problem with it. L3 is running Vista and D3 is XP. L3 should go to Win 7 this week.

I'm leaning more to thinking the issue might be Win 7 Pro vs Win 7 Home Prem, but I would have thought that would have been widely reported if that is the case. Or possibly an IP6 issue - which I know zip about - but is the network layer that implements HomeGroup.

Any other thoughts out there?????

- LazyLeo 1/4/10 (4-Jan-2010 for my European friends)

Thanks chev65, but networking the OTHER computers in the LAN is NOT the issue - the issue is simply that D1 is NOT seen by D2, but IS seen in the WorkGroup by all other Workgroup (i.e. Win 7) members on the LAN.

The WorkGroup consists of 4 members - D1,D2,L1 & L2. The LAN has 2 other non-members (D3 & L3) plus a Print Server. D2 sees the other 2 members (but NOT D1), and L1 and L2 (as well as D1) see all the other 3 members. By "see" I mean when you bring up "Computer" (the old "My Computer" desktop icon from XP days), on the left side of the screen you see Favorites, Libraries, Homegroup, and Computer, and then expand Homegroup, 4 computers are shown except on D2 which only shows 3.

Are you saying that if I took all the other (non-Win7, non-WorkGroup) computers off the LAN then magically D2 will then see D1 in the WorkGroup? Again, my issue is NOT file sharing with the other non-members.

- LazyLeo 1/5/10

"I will only say that you absolutely can't use Homegroup for networking unless every machine on the LAN is a Windows 7 machine."

You are correct IF you want to do network sharing on EVERY machine with EVERY OTHER machine, I don't care about networking D3 and L3 at this time. I'll bring them up to Windows 7 later if need be, but they are a separate (non-) issue to this thread. They could be Linux boxes, VAX's, Cray's, Apples or Oranges that are only sharing the same internet connection. I don't care about them other than they live in my neighborhood.

At this point, only consider the 4 Win7 Homegroup machines:
D1 can access shares on D2, L1 & L2
D2 can access shares on L1 & L2, BUT NOT D1
L1 can access shares on D1,D2 & L2
L2 can access shares on D1,D2 & L1

All Home and Public Settings are identical on all 4 machines. Homegroup is WORKING (kind of).
My only issue is why D2 can't see D1, and figuring out whether the problem is with D1 or D2.

- LazyLeo 1/6/10

Don't now if this will help but what Anti virus do you have installed?, because I was using AVG free 9 and apparently AVG makes homegroup not consistent. After I uninstalled it everthing worked fine.

ownedandout said:

Don't now if this will help but what Anti virus do you have installed?, because I was using AVG free 9 and apparently AVG makes homegroup not consistent. After I uninstalled it everthing worked fine.

Thanks ownedandout! That is exactly the kind of info I was looking for, I AM running AVG Free 9, and it would be something I wouldn't look at. Which one did you find that worked OK?

I ran Norton for years with no problems, but couldn't pass up the "free" after I'd successfully run AVG free 8.x on one of the laptops once my Norton ran out.

- Lazyleo 1/7/10

That did it! D1 was the problem, once I removed AVG9 and installed the MS version, D1 appeared in Homegroup on D2.

So the short answer to this long thread is that if a member of the Homegroup is not visible to another member, even tho it is visible to other members, look at the AntiVirus software.

Thanks again ownedandout!

- Lazyleo 1/12/2010