Network Sharing and Homegroup issue

[rydogg707]

I've been all over these boards finding little bits of help for the issue I am having, but no solution. I've tried pretty much everything.

I have TWO PC's on my network. Since I like Star Wars I named one Ziost, and the other Mandalore. I have turned on Network Discovery on both machines in the Advanced Sharing Settings. I have both machines also set to "Allow Windows to manage homegroup connections (recommended)".

I have looked through all the services recommended by others to make sure they are running. They are on both machines.

I have both machines joined to a homegroup, however Ziost was unable to create a homegroup. The error message simply just said the homegroup could not be created on that machine. So I created the homegroup on Mandalore. No problem, it created just fine and spit out a password. Ziost was able to see the homegroup and join it just fine with the password given out.

I can access Mandalores folders FROM Ziost. And on Ziost I can see Madalore in the Network in Windows Explorer.

However, on Mandalore, it says I'm in a homegroup, but there are no PC's in the homegroup. And Mandalore cannot see Ziost in the Network section of Windows Explorer.

I thought it could be the default firewall settings. But on both machines the firewall settings are identical.

What can I be missing that would allow Ziost to see (and even map a network drive) everything on Mandalore, but then not vice versa? Mandalore is my main, newer PC, so I'm trying to keep it relativly clean and device free. My older PC is Ziost, so I have all my printers and external USB HDD on it.

I have included some pictures to help aide in the troubleshooting. It's almost 2am est, so I apologize if this is a little confusing. I'll be able to check back and respond from work tomorrow. Thanks in advance for any and all help!

 

[Digger]

did you happen to use the easy transfer wiz to migrate your files and settings from a previous build?

Are both pcs using different 7 builds?

 

[rydogg707]

Sorry for not replying yesterday but I did solve the problem on my own.

Both PC's have the 7100 RC build and both were installed fresh from boot.

However, I installed W7 on Ziost a number of weeks ago, and failed to realize I had installed a trial version of a 3rd party firewall, and it was blocking Ziost from being seen on the network.

I decided against this 3rd party firewall so I uninstalled it. Since the computers were on the homegroup already, once the program was uninstalled and the PC rebooted, Ziost could be seen on the network.