I had an issue escalated to me where NetBIOS name resolution didn’t work on one particular machine. DNS was working – you could ping by hostname. However, you couldn’t connect to a remote share using hostnames (although connecting using IP addresses worked).
As a number of other people had already looked at this before me I assumed that the problem must be particularly fiendish and started Googling. I tried all the recommendations to reset Winsock using netsh etc. Nothing worked. I tried uninstalling anything that might be network related – that didn’t work either.
In the end I went back to the basics and found the problem. It seems that somewhere along the line the “TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper” service startup was set to Manual. I started the service and everything started working.
I have no idea how this service was changed from Automatic to Manual but it must have been some time ago as the user had been putting up with the problem for months.
So, if you get the above error and can ping the host by name I suggest you first make sure that the “TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper” service is running. After that try checking all the hard stuff.
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