The Beard (alias Hunsinger the Mike) reported just now:

I may have just found a heck of a trick. If you run across PC’s who are getting spotty GPO adherence, and possibly unreliable network connection, as well as their network explorer folder in windows only shows a handful of the actual PC’s on the lan. Try this powershell command:

PS U:\> set-service -Name fdPHost -startuptype Automatic
PS U:\> Start-service -name fdPHost

The above fixed a very longstanding unpleasantry we had been working on, where Network Neighborhood would not show up and other items just would not work normally over a VPN. Oddly, it turns out that fdPHost is some sort of omnibus networking control service, set to Manual by default, but which lords it over several different sets of protocols.

It’s probably not to be enabled generally or lightly, there could be potential for major addition of network traffic, and security questions too. But on the other hand, it’s there, it’s normally Manual not disabled, and it fixed!

Mike later found a companion service, FDResPub, which reportedly is responsible for broadcasting the presence of network resources, by a Windows machine serving them to its LAN. Although it too is by default set to Manual, a reference gives its description as “Publishes your computer and resources attached to your computer so they can be discovered over the network. If this service is stopped, network resources will no longer be published and they will not be discovered by other computers on the network.” And it stops sometimes with no known reasons, even on domain controllers. So this one too, at least on real servers, is a help if kept set Automatic.