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I am running XBMC on Ubuntu 12.04 as a upnp server on the machine on which my media is stored.
In the network, there is one wired and two wireless clients (all three windows 8 machines).
The wired client works flawlessly, i.e. i start xmbc and can connect to the upnp shares I set up earlier as it is supposed to work.
With the wireless clients it is different:
I can see the XBMC server in the windows explorer network section, browse the media library there and also start movies. However, when I start XBMC, the upnp shares are not available, i.e. I receive the message "Could not connect to network server". It can take a couple of minutes or up to 30 minutes until they become available.
I am clueless what the reason for this behavior is and need help with solving this problem.

Does nobody else have this problem?
I figured another detail that might help: When I first start xbmc on my notebook and then start the server, the shares become available instantly.

Perhaps it has a problem with your wireless encryption? Are you using WEP or WPA? Im not sure if that would make a difference, but I have seen strange stuff happen in networks with devices that dont deal with WPA well. Im just shooting in the dark here.

UPnP can be a cruel and mysterious mistress.

Or it could be another UPnP A/V service on the network that is intermittently broadcasting/interfering with XBMC. Wireless in itself shouldn't necessarily cause issues.

I am using WPA2 encryption - not sure if that makes a difference though. After all it works in principle, only the delay is killing me.
I found somewhere else that some routers have trouble with multicasts... I checked my config but found multicast activated so this can't be the problem either, and again, it works in principle.
There are only two other devices on the network that use upnp - the router and my printer.
What bothers me is that the server is found by the clients straight away when I start the server after the clients. Without knowing anything about how XBMC announces himself as a Upnp server it seems it does that not often enough? Or the clients do not pick up the necessary information from the system but wait instead for a multicast? (I guess anyone who knows about how this really works is laughing out loud on these assumptions now)