But there's a problem. Windows is still balky about displaying newly arrived computers on the network. The problem is especially apparent the first time you boot a new computer on your network. It can only see itself, sometimes for several hours, unless you find a way to give it a swift kick. Despite the new network stack and all the special new networking extras, under it all the same problems exist.

So, while Windows XP's "View Workgroup Computers" isn't needed from a perfect UI perspective, it was a work-around that allowed XP users to supply that swift kick with -- a sort of network refresh. It worked about 70 percent of the time. And when it didn't, your only recourse was to reboot or rebuild your network stack, or both. Ah, the little niceties about Windows peer networking

A tip worth mentioning is that, unlike in Windows XP, if you right-click the Network background and choose Refresh from the context menu, about half the time that will make Windows Vista actively search for network-connected PCs. Because the same setting had no effect in Windows XP, you might not think to try it. The last Vista PC I tried this with required three refresh attempts before the network finally came to life.

I tested the Windows network-connection bug in Vista in a different way. It used to be that you could network with a Windows XP computer that was paused awaiting the entry of a password for initial log-in -- a security vulnerability that it appears Microsoft has fixed in Vista. From one Vista PC, I attempted to make a network connection to a second Vista computer awaiting log-in. The result was an error message saying that the workstation could not be found or was not available. Good, that's as it should be. But when I entered the password on the second machine and allowed it to boot fully, the first machine was still unable to network with the second Vista box. It had tried and failed to network a first time, and was only remembering the failure instead of giving it the old college try. Multiple attempts over a period of 15 minutes all elicited the same results. Meanwhile, other machines on the network had no trouble seeing or accessing the second machine. The first machine required a restart before it would connect with the target PC.

Although some aspects of networking are improved, some are not. For Beta 2, at any rate, Microsoft didn't focus hard enough on the problems in this area. Just adding IPv6 isn't enough. And the old mantra still holds: If at first you don't succeed with Windows networking, reboot, reboot, reboot.