Bizarre MS File sharing problem

Here it goes...

I have a Win 2k and two98 machines on my home network, everything has been
going peachy until about a few weeks ago, when I noticed I had problems with
sharing files over MS file sharing. The two 98 machines can access each
other fine, but when i attempt to access the 2000 machine, it will open it
up and show the shares available but as soon as I attempt to open one of the
folders the network neighborhood window on the 98 machine just locks up.

I've tried serveral things, removing and re adding the protocols and
devices, i've even tried reformatting my win2k machine... twice, the second
time I put winxp on just to see if it affected it. nope, same error.

i'm not sure what to do now, the internet and pinging works fine on all my
machines the the ping communication between them is lossless but i can't
figure out why the sharing is not working correctly.

As of the current moment i can seemingly access the other computer no
problem and am browsing the files as we speak.

some more details, only my system partition is ntfs the rest are fat32, i
have no firewall.

I'd appreciate any help and feel free to ask any questions about any details
i may have left out

thanks