Will a DNS cure network neighborhood issues??

We have a small network spread across two locations and recently connected with a 3 meg data connection so both stores appear as one network. I'm slowly correcting years of issues and recently set up a DHCP server to handle all of the PCs and while doing that I corrected the Workgroup names on all the PCs to match a normal one, one without a space in it like it used to be. We still have issues with some PCs not being seen in network neighborhood and some that are seen do not allow the shared folders to be accessed. I was wondering since a majority are XP and above, I think I have 2 Win2ks but those are spares so not really used, can I configure a bind dns server with all of the PC names and IP addresses in it for our local network and point it back to the ISPs dns server for internet DNS. Would this fix our browsing issues or at least narrow them down to individual PC problems?? If so is there a simple bind setup that can do this? I've just started looking at bind and dns and it has my head spinning, I'd love a drop in place config file that I could modify slightly to handle our workgroup and ip ranges and just change the outside dns server addresses.

Ideas?

Your problem has nothing to do with DNS. It is a problem with mixed technologies. Windows XP and prior used NetBEUI on port 137 to browse the network. Windows Vista and later uses Link-Layer Topology to perform that function. Microsoft does provide a Link Layer Topology Discovery (LLTD) responder that can be added to XP Service Pack 2. There is no support for Win2K.

J.A. Coutts

I thought it was XP and above that used DNS to browse the network?

In addition to 137-139 ports, newer versions of windows also use port 445 for SMB browsing. As far as I know if you're not in a domain DNS doesn't enter in to SMB network browsing. Make sure file & printer sharing is enabled in computers sharing files, and also review if you're using simple file sharing (file sharing wizard in W7) or not. If you want user-specific network permissions you should turn off simple file sharing.

Also came across this article which speaks to the fact that it may be related to NTLM settings; worth taking a look