I have a Home Network Problem with mixture of XP & Vista PC's

[sarah_louise]

I have run network wizards until I am crazy. I have two XP PC's and one Vista PC. All 3 networked PC's are visible from every PC. I can access from Vista to XP but not from the XP pc's to the Vista PC. I have enabled sharing, I have set permissions but still get the message
"you do not have permission etc...etc.. contact the Administrator of the Computer3 Server".
It is no doubt a Vista thing.........?

[sarah_louise]

I have temporarily disabled Windows Defender and Windows Firewall but it makes no difference.

[ACtheTROLL]

Vista is almost certainly the problem .... it's verrrrry sniffy about who it lets in.

start by disconnecting your internet connection (that way you can disable firewalls etc without danger.

first rule is you must have an account for each user on every machine
second - each account must be password protected (with the same password on each machine)

Go to the network and sharing centre make sure you have the sharing options selected.

forget network discovery ... it sucks
map directly to shares

share a folder (duh!)

on a machine called "kitchen" which has a shared folder called "recipes"
you'd go to the network and sharing centre
tools | map network drive
enter the path as \\<computer>\<folder>
so in the example
\\kitchen\recipes
is the path

you should now see a window open showing the files in the shared folder


if that doesn't work ... disable the vista firewall and try again (don't forger to re-enable when you re-connect the internet)

[sarah_louise]

Thanks Neildownx.

I followed the procedure from Annoyances.org and it now works (but loads of warning messages). Not really satisfactory but at least it works both ways now.

1.) Go to your NETWORK CENTER in Control Panel & change the Network Category to PUBLIC. The Vista computers should now see and access the XP computers, but not visa versa. 2.) Go to USER ACCOUNTS in Control Panel & click on MANAGE YOUR NETWORK PASSWORDS on the left menu -- there technically should be an existing entry already in place, select the properties for that entry and add a username and change the existing password. 3.) Restart the Vista computer so that it reconnects to the network. 4.) With the username and password that you provided, you should now be able to access the Vista computer.