Hi. I've only today set up a Windows Server 2003 machine with simple file sharing stuff and DNS on a workgroup 'WORKGROUP'. The machine's name is SERVER.

This was fine, and I could access network shares on my main machine such as \\SERVER\c$ logging into the server's admin account fine.

I then installed the VPN service, and then uninstalled it.

Now I can't access \\SERVER. NBTSTAT -n doesn't show it up anymore, and running the same command on the server prints out a 'no names in local cache' message.

I'm what you'd call a newbie to servers, so could anyone tell me what I've done and how I can get it back so that I can access network shares?

Workgroups aren't used with servers. You join the client machines to the domain.

Try the server ip name instead, infact you should always use the ip address instead of name unless dns server or winns. Do you have a winns server? If not, it could take up to 30 minutes to resolve a netbios name.

I suspect your vpn is still borking the system. A simple repair to nic may fix.

"Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, are in my top 10