The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Peter Johnson wrote:

Dave Plowman wrote:

Oddly, it's all working as it should be today. Without me doing anything
other than checking settings by the booklet I printed out.

Sometimes it just needs time. But a few days ago I ceased to able to
see the shared folder on my NAS boxes on my Win10 PC. Then I powered
one of the NAS boxes down to relocate in the loft, out of sight (part
of my back up strategy), and its share folder came back into view. So
I powered the others off for a few minutes, and their shared folders
reappeared when they came back on line.

That's been a feature of windows since at least XP. It randomly 'loses'
shares.

Probably the main reason you don't encounter this random **** on
'proper' networks, is that the domain controllers are always on, and get
extra votes in the subnet master browser elections, so they will always
be "it", rather than random computers going to sleep, rebooting, turning
back on again all the time, so constant changes of what knows about what.

Additionally they act as internal DNS/WINS servers, but I think it's the
browse lists that help most.