Homegroup Not connecting.

[Etihtsarom]

Hello,
Homegroup is not happening for me. The Homegroup listener service is not running, although all it's dependencies (just the server service actually) are running.

The symptoms are that after joining the homegroup, the computers can not see eachother in the homegroup.

What exactly are all the services and settings needed for this feature to function correctly?

 

[kegobeer]

Have you done any tweaking to your installation? Homegroup should work automatically.

 

[Etihtsarom]

yeah I have made some changes to the services. I will post a list of services that I've changed when I get back.

 

[kegobeer]

Enable the HomeGroup Listener and HomeGroup Provider services.

 

[Etihtsarom]

Thats the thing mate, I left those 2 services alone. Server service is up and running, and server is the only service that homegroup listener depends on, yet homegroup listener can not start.

 

[kegobeer]

Then it's time to start undoing your "tweaks" until things start working again.

 

[BobBlum]

Homegroup Problem - My Solution

After installing Windows 7 on my laptop, it could not join the homegroup on my desktop, where I was still running Release Candidate 1. I solved this by doing the following:

going to the Control Panel of the desktop

selecting "Choose network and sharing options"

then clicking on "Leave the homegroup..."

After leaving the homegroup, I created a new homegroup, with a new password.

Then, on the laptop, I "joined" the homegroup, entering the new password created on the desktop.

Everything then worked fine.

This seems to be a bug. Windows 7 should have allowed integration into the initial homegroup.

Hope this helps. This problem resisted solution for quite a while.

 

[Etihtsarom]

Yeah, this worked just fine. I switched back to an earlier snapshot of the OS (prior to tweaking the services) to check it out, and in that snapshot, had to also do this trick. So yeah, some kindda bug it seems.

 

[Imkruzen]

Impact on Homegroup

I couldn't start Homegroup Listener because Windows Firewall was disabled.