I have a Windows 7 (Home Premium) machine that doubles as a media centre and subversion server. There's a couple of problems with this setup, when connecting to the server from an XP (SP3) machine:

Firstly, the machine won't respond to it's machine name until after it's IP address has been pinged. Here's an example:

Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]
(C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp.

C:\Documents and Settings\Rob>ping damascus
Ping request could not find host damascus. Please check the name and try again.

C:\Documents and Settings\Rob>ping 192.168.1.17

Pinging 192.168.1.17 with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 192.168.1.17: bytes=32 time=2ms TTL=128
...

Ping statistics for 192.168.1.17:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 1ms, Maximum = 2ms, Average = 1ms

C:\Documents and Settings\Rob>ping damascus

Pinging damascus [192.168.1.17] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 192.168.1.17: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=128
....

Ping statistics for 192.168.1.17:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 0ms, Maximum = 1ms, Average = 0ms

C:\Documents and Settings\Rob>

Likewise, subversion commands with either the machine name or IP address will fail until the machine's IP address is pinged. Occasionally, the machine won't respond to pings on it's IP address, it'll just come back with "Request timed out". The svn server is VisualSVN, if that helps...

Any ideas?