I've spent some time rewriting all the smb.conf files to be the same on all the servers except for the name and the shares, based on the one on the working server. It made no difference.

The files have various permissions. The media server shares are read only public ones while the other two servers are user private rw. But, as I say, it all worked fine up to about three days ago.

The servers are all on static IPs. The desktop machines are DHCP.

No idea what the problem is. I've spent hours fiddling with it, nothing I've tried has affected it at all. I've even tried setting up a WINS server, which has had no effect either one way or the other. I really don't want to have to reinstall the entire damn os and hundreds of applications to fix one stupid problem. Especially one that was created from nowhere. That's a week of my time I'd prefer to use for more interesting things

pca