(Home sharing could not be started because an error occurred (-3259))? what's happening?

I'm having the exact same problem. I've made sure all my firewalls are off...nothing's working...

Glad I'm not the only one going a little crazy over this. Home sharing worked fine until I upgraded to iTunes 10.5 and iOS 5 this evening. I get the error with or without the firewall. I tried following advice in an old iTunes article about opening ports in the firewall, rebooted PC, router and cable modem, contacted my firewall company (ZoneAlarm) etc, etc. Still no luck *sigh* 😢

Win7 Home Edition

iPad2 iOS5

AppleTV

What's even more frustrating is that my home sharing was "on" but it wasn't showing up on Apple TV. I came out to iTunes to check to make sure it was on, thought "I'll turn it off and back on again" thinking it would show up on Apple TV....now I'm stuck.

ARRGGHH!!

Having same issue. Even downgraded iTunes to 10.2. Still getting error -3259 when trying to enable home sharing.

I just tried it again this morning and it worked! Hope you all have the same luck I did if you try again today...🙂

I take it back. It's stopped working again. It only worked for a split second...went to Apple TV and it was there...went to upgrade Apple TV to iOS5 and it wouldn't work. Checked the "computers" section...no libraries. Even though iTunes is showing it's turned on.

Same here, Win7 64-bit. Just upgraded to 10.5 and iOS 5 on my iPad and AppleTV 2. Home sharing stopped working, so I tried turning off firewall, and disabling Home Sharing. Now whenever I try to re-enable it, it complains with this error.

I'm starting to think this issue has nothing to do with our computers, and everything to do with Apple's authentication servers. -3259 is normally a network timeout error. On a whim I tried created a home share with a bogus username/password and got the same error. I should have gotten an invalid password/account error instead. I bet it tries to authenticate your account everytime it tries to sync up home shares and their servers are overloaded. It's just constantly timing out.

I imagine that in a week when everyone is done upgrading, this problem will mysteriously disapear.

I'm getting an error of 12004. Very frustrating.

I hope you're right -- and the issues with iCloud disappear too. 😟

Exact same issues here as well. Win 7 64bit. Just upgraded to 10.5 and iOS5. I imagine the servers are getting crushed with the new icloud logins and calendar uploades and etc. Hopefully it is just volume. If its an error, then hopefully apple is already on it. This will impact a lot of people I am guessing.

same issue here. It seems to be the Apple Servers, as I've tried on 10.6/10.7 and with Itunes 10.4/10.5 and neither works. Apple TV IOS 5 doesn't work either. They need to fix the issue asap, as this is ridiculous.

Apple servers are finally stable and was able to activate home-sharing

This ****** me off ! 😟

I am running iTunes 10.5 on Windows 7 SP1. I was getting the same -3259 error and found out that I didn't have the proper share setting enabled on my home network. To resolve the problem, I went into Control Panel > System Security > Windows Firewall > Allow Programs communicate through windows firewall. I'm not sure exactly which one it was, but when I granted access to windows remote management, volume management, and windows media player sharing service, the error immediately went away and is playing nicely with all my other iProducts.

Hope this helps someone else.