Broadcast traffic not being sent over L2TP

I’ve spent the last 14 hours or so trying to find out why broadcast traffic is not being sent over my VPN (desktop client → L2TP/IPsec). I have been using this tutorial. I need to be able to see network devices from Network Places on my PC and Network on my Mac. I have been through every Google result for this issue but still cannot figure out what’s wrong.

Some users said to add bridges, others said that a WINS server was necessary, and a few more said that this could be accomplished with simple routes. I’ve tried all of these (with the exception of deploying a WINS server), so clearly I’m doing something wrong. The VPN is using the DHCP pool, so they’re on the same subnet. I can ping VPN clients and they can ping me.

Given that I used the above tutorial, what step is missing to ensure that broadcast traffic is flowing?

Follow this :

http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:BCP_bridging_(PPP_tunnel_bridging)

Adjust it for your scenario.

I did try this tutorial, but found that this is not a solution for road warriors, but rather for site to site VPN. If this IS for road warriors, could someone please explain how to adapt it to a single L2TP connection?

Have you read through http://forum.mikrotik.com/t/add-l2tp-interface-to-bridge-how/26423/1 and http://forum.mikrotik.com/t/mt-as-l2tp-ipsec-vpn-server-for-win-xp-client-with-preshared/15709/1

I have, although it seems there are a dozen or so conflicting fixes for the same problem. Was there a particular solution in one of those threads that you know works or were you just checking if I attempted all of these different fixes? I feel like this can be uniformly fixed with a simple procedure.

Can someone please suggest a tested, working solution?

The only way I got shares on an XP pc to work over the VPN from a win7 client was using this convention.

\192.168.100.45