Up till last week, all the PCs on my home network were able to browse each other and the media/file server. The media/file server is running Mint 15, two PC are running Windows (XP and 7), then two laptops are running Mint 16 and Fedora 20. For some reason around Tuesday (the 25th), the two linux laptops both stopped being able to find any other PCs on the network - neither on wireless or gigabit ethernet. Both laptops can PING all the other PCs, and the Windows PCs can access all the shares (as can the blu-ray players) on the media/file server. But when I try browsing the network on either linux laptop, they only show 'Windows Network' - and double-clicking on that just generates a quick error that the location cannot be mounted.

I have been searching the internet for answers and thus have tried totally disabling the firewall - which has not helped. Both laptops barely take a second to come back with the errors that Windows Network cannot be viewed (while the Linux machines are not showing up at all) - even though I can access the internet and PING all the other PCs (almost constantly with 3-6ms times).

Configuration doesn't really make sense as they were working fine till the same day. I disabled the firewalls, thinking that maybe an update had caused this (as both laptops lost their ability to browse any other computers at the same time).

Any other ideas?

I assume you are using a file manager (nemo?) to browse the network. If so have you tried entering a particular server in the file manager i.e. smb://server_ip

Have you tried using a command line utility to browse the network like findsmb or smbtree?

Yes, I am using the default File Manager in each distro. I tried your advice and it worked to get me back into the shares - thanks!

I'm still wondering why the browsing no longer works?