With regard to my earlier thread
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...21#post4932321
turns out NM was the culprit and i took your advise and uninstalled NM...and viola i now have full control over who i take internet of through the LAN and do so at will.Thanks to our member chili555 for that.

BUT my problem regarding the inability to see all the other systems on my LAN remains...sometimes the systems are visible in Places->Network and sometimes not...

Some of the systems are accessible by smb://<sys name>/ some are not...strange...

Thanks...
Shiv