Network Troubleshooting....

I have a VPN setup between my work and home.

The connection works great, however sometimes the HOME computer, or client cannot access the network shares here at work. From work, I can browse the home computer with no problems ever. From home sometimes it works, sometimes it dosnt.

If I am at the home computer and I try to open a computer in the network neighborhood at work, it will either work, or bring up an error message. If I get the error, i just goto the command prompt and ping the internal lan ip of the remote computer that I want to browse, then click the computer's link again and it lets me browse. Crazy.

However, I noticed that if I am sitting at the office, I can type in --> PING HOME (HOME = name of client computer)
and it pings just fine

however from home i cannot type
PING ADMIN
PING KATHY1
PING JIM1
or anything, ps. those are the computer names at work

but from the client I can ping the ip address of those computers and it replies just fine.

if from home I type
ping -a 192.168.0.5 (remote lan ip address of ADMIN)

then it replies fine, and dissolbes 192.168.0.5 to ADMIN

so why isnt PING ADMIN working?

Could this be a reason browsing sometimes works, and sometimes acts like it times out since I can ping the computers ip address to get the browsing back up and working?

- Cheers!