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Question is in the title, I had some friends visit and attach their PC's to my network. Ever since then, even long after the PC's were no longer attached, I am still getting entries for their PC's showing up in my Network folder of Windows Explorer, even after I refresh the view. How can I clear these out?

Answer notes: To aid the search of others later, it turns out that the second half of harrymc's answer was the correct part. I went in to my router (THOMSON TG585v7) firmware and found a list of computers under Home > Home Network > Devices screen. Hitting Configure on this screen let me delete old computers off the list and as soon as I did that, they no longer showed up in the Network folder.

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4 Answers

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Another thing to try is clearing the DNS cache:
Open the command prompt in administrator mode and type "ipconfig /flushdns" and reboot.

If it's your router that remembers these ghosts, the only way I know to erase them is to reload factory settings, which I caution against (the cure is worse than the problem). You might try to reboot your router, if haven't done so already, then reboot your computer.

If all else fails, the ghosts will not stay there forever. Just wait thru the timeout period, which I heard might be something like 30-60 days.

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You should be able to just right click on the entry in the Network view and pick Delete.

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There is no Delete option on the computers in network view. Only Open, Open in New Window, Connect with Remote Desktop and Create Shortcut. – Nidonocu Sep 25 '09 at 16:36
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This may not work, but it's worth a go until someone with more knowledge comes along: Go into the Network and Sharing Center, and click Change advanced sharing settings. From there, drop down Home or Work (assuming that's what you're using), and then change the Network discovery option to off. Save the changes and then have a look to see if those computers disappeared. Make sure to hit refresh or F5. If they did go away, you could probably turn network discovery back on. Like I said, it may not work, so don't get mad at me... ;)

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Nope, all still there. :/ – Nidonocu Sep 25 '09 at 18:11
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I had the same problem with Windows 7. To remove the old network computer names, you will need to re-register the DNS names.

Open a Command Prompt and type:

ipconfig /registerdns
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protected by Diago Dec 21 '10 at 17:55

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