Shortcut Icons Disappeared

2011dec20: Our 5 workstations and 1 server are hard wire networked. 4 of our workstations and the server are running XP something. My system is XP Pro and is about 5 years old. Couple months ago, I had just opened My Network Places, where there are 4 or 5 shortcuts to folders on our server, then went to the other room to get a number for a drawing I was going to look up in the Drawings folder on the server. When I came back, the window was still open but all the shortcut icons, even the window itself, everything was gone - nothing but white was left in their place. I tried opening and closing the window a couple times which didn't help, then I rebooted a couple times and that didn't help either. About an hour later I opened MNPs again and the one connection I needed at that time, Shared Documents, was the only connection that came up. After a bit I closed the MNPs window and reopened it. This time 3 icons came up. By the end of the day everything was back to normal. Maybe twice since then not all icons would show, but everything would return to normal very shortly. This morning I had the MNPs window open, had one of the connections open and was working in one of the folders when everything simply disappeared. No one else here seems to be experiencing this issue.
2012feb02: All but one of the shortcut icons have been gone from my MNPs for two days now. All the rebooting and window opening and closing does no good. From another workstation similar in age and manufacture as mine everything is in its proper place and works fine. We just replaced an older workstation this past weekend and it has Windows 7, I can't even find MNPs so I don't know if everything is fine there or not. On my workstation, when I right click My Network Places - Map Network Drive - Browse, the only folder that shows in the tree is the folder that currently shows in my My Network Places on my workstation. When I checked My Computer on the server, the folder that shows in my MNP's on the server is the only folder that shows on my system. I cannot find my Drawings folder anywhere on the server, yet I can access it via shortcut icon on another workstation. Oh, and one more thing, I'm not a tech, not even very compuliterate, and my Compudoc is baffled by this too.
2012feb28: Any guesses as to what may be going on will be greatly appreciated. Thanks, K.

 

Maybe moving this to the Networking Forum in a more succinct version would be better than here in the software forum?