how to solve Network Browsing Problems in windows 8?

how to solve Network Browsing Problems in windows 8?


Network browsing in Windows has always been a fragile system plagued with bugs and configuration pitfalls.  If you’ve arrived at this page to find a solution, rest assured you are not alone.

I recently encountered a Windows 8 problem where the “Network” folder only showed the local computer and file shares.  When trying the “net view” command, the response was “A remote API error occurred.”  Not at all helpful, is it?  The Windows 2003 domain controller was not experiencing any problems, and the Windows 8 computer showed up normally on the server.



Update June 2, 2013: I have not yet found any reliable solution for this problem.
This article contains some ideas I’ve found and tried so far, none of which seem to work in the long run.

I made a several changes:
  1. Stop and disable the Computer Browser service in Windows 8.
  2. In the Network and Sharing Center control panel, click on “Change advanced sharing settings”.
  3. Enable network discovery.
  4. Enable file and printer sharing.
  5. Disable public folder sharing.
  6. Click the “Save changes” button.
  7. Reboot the Windows 8 computer.
As best as I understand those settings, Windows 8 comes with a default configuration called “Turn off network discovery” that prevents domain network browsing.  This is one of the more annoying problems with the latest operating system.

After enabling network discovery, I found that I could only browse the network in Windows 8 while a Windows XP computer was also running.  For some reason, Windows 8 was compatible with the Windows XP backup browser, but it could not cooperate with the Windows 2003 master browser.

The other symptom that will appear while network discovery is disabled is a pair of system events that occur about 10 minutes after each reboot:

Log Name: System
Source: BROWSER
Event ID: 8021
Level: Warning
Description:
The browser service was unable to retrieve a list of servers from the browser master …
Log Name: System
Source: BROWSER
Event ID: 8032
Level: Information
Description:
The browser service has failed to retrieve the backup list too many times on transport … The backup browser is stopping.
I tried disabling encryption after reading a Windows 7 forum post called Browsing the network issues.  After rebooting the computers the problem seemed to be solved for a short time, but then reverted to API errors again.  These were the steps I used:


  1. In the Domain Security Policy admin tool on the Windows 2003 server, surf to Local Policies \ Security Options \ Network security: Minimum session security for NTLM SSP based (include secure RPC) servers
  2. Make sure the policy is defined and that NTLMv2 session security and 128-bit encryption are both disabled (not checked).
  3. Do the same for the “clients” policy right above it.  I found that it was also possible to create a GPO that applies to Windows 8 computers only so that the “clients” policy wouldn’t affect XP clients.
  4. From the Windows 8 Command Prompt, run gpupdate.
  5. Reboot the domain controller.
  6. Reboot the Windows 8 computer.
Those steps did not improve the situation after continued testing, and I have reverted all of those changes.
Further testing has resulted in the Network list and the “net view” command both working after simply doing a full Restart of Windows 8.  Results have not been consistent.  One area that needs further testing is what happens when different users are first to log in after a restart.  Windows 8 Shut Down and Sleep modes do nothing to affect network browsing.

My latest suspect is the interactions directly between Windows 8 and Windows XP.  Is it possible that the Windows 8 browser works after a reboot, but only for as long as there are no Windows XP browsers on the network?
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