Have you run the Homegroup Troubleshooter?
Also, you might check the Services.msc panel and see if you have the Homegroup Services running,
HomegroupProvider and HomegroupListener
But if you have a Homegroup set up on one system and the other system still shows "ready to create", the second system is probably not seeing the first on the network. And this, of course would depend on the limitation Trouble mentioned about which versions of Windows 7 can create a Homegroup.