okay, fast and painful here - why woul every pc on a workgroup network see and browse each other, but one (it can be seen and browsed) sees the others but gets the you might not have permission to use this network resource blah,blah wtf?
resolved the problem. sure, the windows firewall was the first thing to take down but that didn't help. so I dug, dug and dug. Changed settings, ran/stopped services. at one point that special PC lost all the other PCs. In the end it turned out that I had to delete a registry DWORD value which sets the type of your node connection (ipconfig /all in cmd to view) - now everything rolls super fine. Maybe only the deletion of that value isn't the thing (maybe it's the combination - enabling some services, enabling the local net user guest etc) that put everything to where it should be, but it works.
Another thing that can cause all sorts of hell is if you have, say the IPX/SPX protocol installed on some and not others.
