Recently our network has been acting up. We can no longer browse our workgroup but if you type in \\computer name it will take you there. Also, out of nowhere some computers have been asking for a username and password that nobody can figure out. There are about 20 of us going through a switch here at the house and we are all on xp home, pro, MCE, or vista. Any ideas what happened or how to fix it?

Are you prompted for a password accessing all shares, or just those on the Vista Machines? Its kind of a pain in the ass to enable and keep enabled anonymous sharing on Vista

both vista and xp home prompts for the password

for xp i think all you have to do is enable the guest account

The best thing to probably do would be to go through the network setup wizard, make sure the machines are in the same workgroup- change it to something from the default mshome though, and that you enable file and printer sharing, this should solve the problem.

Nothing changed though. What would cause 20ish computers to spontaneously start acting this way?

Microsoft's random date generator that fucks up any and everything on the date you were given upon installation of an OS.

If they all started acting up around the same time, then good 'ol Microsoft probably released an update to screw up the whole thing -I'm a network admin and deal with this kind of random crap on a daily basis.