Have you tried searching for the server by name? I have two e-smith servers that are on two different LANs in seperate locations. I connect directly from my win2k client machine to one of the servers that is on the same LAN within the same workgroup. I connect to the other server via VPN. The second servers workgroup is different so I don't see it in network neighborhood. I was able to search for the server by machine name, locate it, and map network drives to it.
Hope this helps,
John Goodwin