Cowgirl started a local world in single player and played for a while. Eventually I asked to join, thinking she could just open to LAN and my Minecraft running on Windows 8 would find it.
Nope. I tried all kinds of things, but eventually I had to completely disable my firewall and then direct connect to her IP and port. Nothing else worked. I have no idea why.
My son running Windows XP had no problem seeing and connecting, of course...
Oh, and I found her two veins of diamonds and I'm waiting for her to log back in so I can watch her mine them :)
Is the firewall set to allow Java?
Yeah, I allowed Java through the firewall. Eventually I turned the firewall off completely and I still couldn't find the world shared to LAN. I had to use the Direct Connect feature with the IP address to connect to it.
In googling for my problem, I can tell you that many, many other people are having the same problem.
That's gotta be annoying. Hope you get things connecting
Oh I just thought of this but do you have VPN software set up on that Windows 8 machine? Maybe it's trying to connect through the wrong gateway
Yup, had that thought as well, killed all VPN clients and made sure they weren't running anymore as per Task Manager. Also uninstalled VMware, which made extra (virtual) network adapters.
Hmm
My best guess is windows is still filtering out broadcast or multicast traffic even with the main firewall stuff off.