I also find similar questions on microsoft newsgroup. One is as follows:
I have a computer running Windows XP Professional that has multiple disk resources shared on a LAN. NetBIOS is turned on, file and printer sharing is turned on, and I am not running any firewalls. The problem is that from the WinXP machine, I can access the fileshares on the Win98 box. But, if I try to access the WinXP shares from the Win98 box, I get a error that states '\\Name is not available. This device does not exist on the network.' even though the WinXP machine shows up in Win98's network neighboorhood. This was a intermitent problem and I would just reboot the Win98 machine until it would talk to the WinXP machine. Now, no matter how many times that I reboot the Win98 machine, it flat refuses to talk to the WinXP machine. I have basic IP connectivity as I can ping between the two computers. In fact, from the Win98 machine, I
can telnet into the WinXP machine. I have DHCP services available and
name resolution is provided by a DNS server that is on the local subnet running on a computer using the Unix platform. Both machines can access the internet just fine. What is going on?