printers disappear – unplug hub

We’re running 7 Win 9X, 1 ME, and 1 XP PCs on a peer-to-peer network. We also have 2 printers setup as shared local printers and 2 network printers. Lately, the printers disappear. It seems to happen more often in the morning, but not necessarilybefore anyone has printed to one of them. It doesn’t seem to always affect all the PCs. Quite often, a PC that looses its printers will also lock up. Affected printers cannot even access the Printers folder (Start/Settings/Printers), so they cannot even print to a local printer.

We’ve found that if the hub is unplugged and plugged back in, and then all affected PCs re-booted (sometimes multiple times) the problem goes away and the printers quit hiding for that day. This is an intermittent problem and does not happen every day.