>>One of my users has 3 AMD6 350 machines running on a Windows 98 peer to peer network. The machines are behaving erratically. Periodically a message will display 'Device X not found on Network.' with options to abort retry or fail. The machine would then bail out to DOS on the network drive that it just said did not exist. All the machines would then have to be rebooted to get the program to work on any of them. What I know: the wiring is good, the hub is good, the cards are good and our software is running on many many similiar network systems without this problem.
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>I've had some of these problems (precisely, the 'Device X not found on Network.', sometimes with a disk share where we have several open files, more seldom with a printer) with NetBEUI peer-to-peer (with at least one station using W98, and some or none in W95). Though, we usually didn't have to reboot - just restarted the app, reconnecting to the network shares first (we run them from .bat files which usually call hook.bat first, which does something like this:
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>net use * /d
>net use x: \\machine\share /yes
>net use y: \\another\share2 /yes
>net use lpt1: \\server\printer /yes
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>This actually means your drive mappings were disconnected, and if I knew why, I should have solved it already. It takes carefull setting of Browse Master to Enabled on one machine (usually the strongest one), and Disabled on all others. The Automatic setting was the (wrong) default, which created problems even in pure-w95 environments.
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There's a known bug in situations where a Win95 box became browse master in an environment where there were NT or Win98 boxes around (both of which can support NBT) where all machines could disappear from Network Neighborhood. The only way to prevent this from happening is to disable all Win95 boxes ability to become a browse master by adding the File and Printer Sharing for Microsoft networks service, and explicitly disabling the station's ability to become browse master, using an NT or Win98 box as a browse master instead. I've also had some success with only the NWLink/IPX/SPX compatible protocol stack and NetBIOS over IPX enabled with no other stacks available on the LAN.

>I'm not saying that this has cleared out the problem; it only doesn't appear so often anymore. What made it go away was switching from NerBEUI to TCP/IP, but we can't do it in some situations where we still have DOS clients on some machines.
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>Of course, if anyone knows more about this problem, I'm curious too.