2 machines and folder sharing

[mac_shinobi]

Just had an incident the other day where a couple of folders were shared on one machine ( all the right permissions for the other user on the other machine to access ) and whenever that other machine tried to access it, it would just say that it didnt exist and that it basically wasnt there, yet I could ping the machine but it would refuse to let me connect to the shared folder. yet I rebooted the machine and then it worked fine, was just curious if there was a service that was related to windows folder sharing that can be restarted without the need to restart the machine.

[Halfmad]

computer browser service?

had a few problems with it, generally just turn it off on any computer that's not a server. Usually the culprit if you can ping a computer but can't navigate to it or use shared resources.

[CHR1S]

Also it could be XP SP2 firewall not setting the permissions properly, assuming that A) Its XP SP2 (obviously) and B) The firewall is turned on.