Spooky Network Problem........

[Skywatch]

So this is the situation.

This has happened a few times in recent months and it's always down to the same cause.......a raspberry pi running xbian.

I am sat at my win7 (yeah, I know already!) laptop and open up windows explorer to browse the network. Only thing is that nothing is showing. No NAS, No pi's, nothing. All network devices can be pinged successfully but don't show at all in explorer. I can HTTP into the server too, but just can't see it in the network window!

When I unplug the network cable from the offending pi, suddenly everything appears in the laptops explorer window. No SSH login is available on the pi when this happens. It seems like the network function has just died. Reboot the pi (locally) and all is well again, for a while at least. It can take many weeks or months to happen again!

This has happened 4 times now, all at random and with both UK and Chinese manufactured pi's.

To see my set up click on my user name above and see the profile.

Can anyone suggest what might be causing this and how to fix it? Is it a master browser issue? Something else? - It has me scratching my head!

Cheers

Skywatch.