all went well for me i believe this round, i'd love to know how to remove the now uneeded "windows network" folder
You don't want to remove the unwanted "windows network". Thats where your workgroups should be and within those workgroups should be the hosts. The reason you are seeing hosts listed disassociated from their workgroups is a fluke. Learn to live with it.
The error message is a rather odd one though. Well, the error message isn't odd - it happens quite a lot. In fact I wrote a howto on it. The oddity is that a "failed to retrieve share list from server" indicates a host name resolution problem in your network or possibly a firewall in the way. Yet I'm assuming all your hosts are listed in the first screen. I don't think I've ever seen both of those things happening at the same time.
Based on the description of how your system is running on some of your other posts though you should be getting used to these anomalies by now.
