cannot browse my own workgroup after reboot?

A friend wants to set up a LAN between his office PC and his assistant's PC.
They have some sort of unix server that I'm not going to mess with, I am
just going to use workgroups.

So I created a new workgroup, let's say "john1", then reboot (required). In
my network neighborbood I then see the workgroup john1, plus a few other
workgroups (e.g. home, workgroup, ...), and under the workgroup john1 I can
see my own shares.

That's good. Now if I reboot again without doing anything else, I no longer
see other workgroups in my network neighborhood, and if I try to view john1,
I get an error message saying I'm not authorized to log on. Why??

If I make up another workgroup, say john2, then after reboot I can again see
workgroup john2 plus a few other workgroups, but after rebooting again, I
can't join this workgroup.

Any idea what is going wrong?

Oh and I tried to use browstat, but can't figure out what it wants for the
second parameter after getmaster.