Windows sharing betweeen Vista Premium, XP Pro and XP Home

[chrishunt]

Very very confused

I have 3 machines

1 Vista Home Premium Desktop
1 XP Pro Laptop
1 XP Home Laptop

When I open windows explorer and go to

My Network Places -> Microsoft Windows Network -> Mshome

All of the machines are listed on each machine, ie all of the machines can "see" each other (I already changed the Vista machines workgroup name to MSHOME)

Now I am observing behaviour which has me scratching my head:

From the Vista Machine
(Network discover on, File sharing on, Public Folder On Read Only, Printer sharing On, Password Protected sharing off, media sharing off)

clicking on both the laptop names in Network brings up a login dialogue box

From the XP pro laptop

For the XP Home laptop when I click on it I see a dialogue box saying that I don't have permissions to use this device

For the Vista machine I get login dialogue box

From the XP home machine

For the XP pro laptop I get a login dialogue
For the Vista Machine I see a list of printers and the public folder


All firewalls have been turned off (except the h/w firewall which my home network sits behind)

Any suggestions?

thanks,

Chris

[chrishunt]

Made some progress

Ran the Network Setup Wizard and all of the machines can see each others shares except the XP Pro laptop cannot see the Vista Machine...

Any thoughts on this last one?

thanks

Chris

BTW discovered that if you run through the network setup wizard and select the "This computer connects to the internet through a residual gateway or through another computer on the network" you get a "Internet Gateway" row on the network connections window

[johnwill]

For the XP machines, try this first.

Create a file in notepad named FIXANON.REG with the following contents:

You should have 3 boxes on the bottom in NOTEPAD.
1)Filename : FIXANON.REG
2)Save as type: all files
3)Encoding: ANSI
If you do not change it from txt type to All files type, then the file will actually be FIXANON.REG.txt, this won't accomplish the desired result.

------------------- Use text after this line -------------------
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa]
"restrictanonymous"=dword:00000000
------------------- Use text before this line -----------------

Double click on the file and say Yes to the merge into registry question.

Reboot the computer.


For the Vista machine, make sure the login account has a password.

For each of the machines, create a user account with the same name/password as is used by the connecting machine. You don't have to use these accounts, they just want to exist.

[chrishunt]

Thanks John but that registry value was already zero.

What is weird is the Vista machine shows up in the list of computers under "MSHOME" on both XP machines.

If I click on it from the XP home machine I see the Vista Machines printer and Public folder.

If I click on it from the XP pro machine I get a login box.

If I change the Vista machine to password protected sharing I get a login dialogue box on the XP home machine and still get one on the XP pro machine.

If I change the Vista machine back the XP home machine no longer produces a login dialogue but the XP pro machine still does!

It looks like its something with the XP pro machine, but what has me stumped.

The guest account is "off" on both the XP pro and XP home machine and the Vista machine.

The XP pro machine has a "Guest" account under "Local Users and Groups", I have tried with this enabled and disabled.

The XP home machine only has a single user no password so as soon as it boots that user is logged in.

The XP pro machine has 2 users, the (administrator) account I'm using has no password. I know the security is lax but the machines never leave the house and I don't store any sensitive information on them as I have a NAS drive for anything like that (don't save passwords for website etc either in the browsers).

[johnwill]

You should enable Simple Sharing on the XP-Pro machine, that should eliminate it's password prompt.

[chrishunt]

John,

had simple file sharing configured and checked under windows explorer-> tools-> folder options -> view... However I have now managed to fix the problem :-)

I logged into the pro machine using the other account, one with a password and was able to see the vista public folder and printer without a login box being displayed. So.... I added a password on the pro machine for the account that wasn't working and hey presto the original account stopped producing a login box!!! It would appear that the XP pro machine required the user to have logged in with a password. What is weird is that without the password the xp pro machine could see the XP home shares...

Perhaps it was something to do with a local security policy which the home machine wouldn't have?

[johnwill]

I always have passwords on all my computers. If you want them to login to the desktop, you can run.

Start, Run, control userpasswords

Configure the account you want to auto-login there.