Trying to solve what I believe to be a Master Browser issue. WINS appears to be working fine and has all clients registered but Network Places does not show all clients and varies through out the day-it varies alot.

Servers= Win 2000 with DCs Native Mode
Clients 2000 and XP

"BRowstat status" gives following results:

DC1 says "master name cannot be determined from GeTAdapterStatus"(it does show three backup servers though)
DC2 says master browser is DC2
DC3 says master browser is DC3
DC5 says master browser is DC5

No DC4

On PCs running browstat status gives:
PC1 says another PC(not server) is the Master Browser (PC21889)
PC2 says -same PC21889
PC3 says -DC2 -unable to retrieve server list

Backup servers that show up with the browstat command are different on each machine -many different ones.

Roles
RID=DC02
PDC=DC02
Infastructure=DC05
Schema=DC02
Domain Naming=DC02

We have 1500 computers in this domain with no internal firewalls and hoping to not have to do registry changes if possible

DC2 should be the master broswer since it handles the PDC fsmo role.

Netbios [not to be confused with netbeui] is enabled on all the servers? [tcp/ip properties on the nic]

Give a person a fish, they eat for a day. Suggest they internet search and they learn a skill for a lifetime.

We have Netbios enabled on all server and each WINS server has it's self as the WINS server as Microsoft recommended.

DC2 should be the domain master browser? Any other ideas what I can check or utilities I can use to gather more information to find out the problem? an election problem maybe?

Also I have run these

DC01
browstat getmaster \device\NetBT_Tcpip_{2B2FE694-6684-4647-B5BD-7378470838E5} corp
=Access is Denied
browstat getmaster \device\NetBT_Tcpip_{2B2FE694-6684-4647-B5BD-7378470838E5} corp
=DC02

DC02
browstat getmaster \device\NetBT_Tcpip_{0F6CD0FE-9C04-43F4-937C-3BD35E98FF2F} corp
=DC02
browstat getPDC \device\NetBT_Tcpip_{0F6CD0FE-9C04-43F4-937C-3BD35E98FF2F} corp
=DC02

DC03
browstat getmaster \device\NetBT_Tcpip_{4A3CDA76-0587-4443-9273-93e9f67D970B} corp
=DC03
browstat getpdc \device\NetBT_Tcpip_{4A3CDA76-0587-4443-9273-93e9f67D970B} corp
=DC02

DC05
browstat getmaster \device\NetBT_Tcpip_{4A3CDA76-0587-4443-9273-93e9f67D970B} corp
=DC05
browstat getpdc \device\NetBT_Tcpip_{4A3CDA76-0587-4443-9273-93e9f67D970B} corp
DC02

http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsServer/en/Library/e1cc4f8c-04f5-4b98-a04c-1ba601fb5d421033.mspx

End of the article leads me to think you have a DNS issue. Key is name resolution. Since DNS is the key name resolver this is where I would start.

But then again you mention multiple Wins servers but you only have xp and 2000 clients which DONT NEED WINS.

Are all these units in the same subnet?

My thought is that you don't have a browser issue but a name resolution issue which shows up as you report.

"each WINS server has it's self as the WINS server". That is a primary wins server per subnet. If you only have one subnet you should not have multiple primary wins servers

Give a person a fish, they eat for a day. Suggest they internet search and they learn a skill for a lifetime.

I will check out that article. We have 20 subnets and we need WINS for some of our utilities. Our Antivirus and our Antispyware display via WINS and a few others . We do have have 2 wins servers in 2 subnet, then the other 2 in seperate subnets. We do see master browsers in almost all subnets...but not all. We do see multiple master browers in some subnets using "browstat view". I see 27 master browsers at this time.

I was not able to find anything in link that could help me....still stuck.

Did you read the other ones below it?

Flush the wins servers?
no event viewer messages?
no dns error messages?
can ping by name to servers from any subnet?
ip routing has port 136/137 open?
does the fsmo pdc role holder have the complete list?

Give a person a fish, they eat for a day. Suggest they internet search and they learn a skill for a lifetime.