Networking - No Local Hosts

weak sauce people, weak sauce...

I have 20-25 machines that due to the constraints of a legacy system must share their own databases at any given time. I have had no problem connecting between them up until now and hardware/software-wise there are three groups of identical systems.

I have one and only one system that cannot see any other local hosts on the FM network, neither does it appear as a local host to other users.

Filemaker sharing is enabled and the databases themselves are set to be visible.

The firewall is set to allow FM sharing and in fact, I have simply turned off the firewall with the same result.

All of these systems are able to access each other through normal OS file sharing for non-fm purposes and the machines all respond to ping.

I have changed the machine to a static IP with no change.

Adding other computers manually to "Favorite Hosts" worked ONCE. After that, files shared by those systems did not appear. Also, ONCE, a dialogue popped up asking for a password to access files on the selected system. The files are not passworded and the dialogue appeared to be FM not XP.

Any ideas??

much thanks,

matt