Yesterday with the help of this topicI was able to connect my two computers and Map a drive and transfer over 25 gigs of files but today I'm at wits end,I cannot connect the two. http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/w7itpronetworking/thread/033c418b-1096-4df7-bfad-fd3d431f3cd5I even disabled both firewalls after going through all the steps above again. Please help.

First check the steps mentioned in the topic again. If any step is unclear or failed to be perform, please let me know. 1. know what the Computer name is and what Workgroup it belongs to. 2. adjust Win7 settings to allow for sharing with older OS on other networked systems. 3. choose which folders to share on the network and adjust properties to do so. 4. share folders to Everyone. Then please get the computer name and IP address of the target computer. On local computer, input \\ipaddress and \\computername to see if we can access the target computer. If failed, please write down the error or capture a screenshot. Tip: Windows XP Home can only use the Simple File Sharing way to share files. So please enable the Guest account on Windows XP. If still failed, try give a password to Guest account.

Thanks for all your efforts.Iwent through everything again and again andit was all the same as when I connected and transferred over 25 gigs of files before but still would not connect. I tried to use the guest account also to no avail. I give up on this. I wanted to connect to transfer files from the old computer to the new on and give the old computer away. I e-mailed what stuff I needed to myself to transfer to the new computer and am satisfied. I will not likely need to network computers again until Win8 or nine comes out. Hopefully by then it will be easier.Many thanks again for your efforts.

Hi, If you would like to try the sharing again in the future, please let me know the wholeerror (in exact) wheninput \\ipaddress and \\computername to access the target computer.

WORKAROUND SUCCESSFUL!! To recap, my network consists of 3 xp machines hard wired, 1 xp wireless and 1 win 7 wireless attached to a netgear router. I am using WEP wireless security with a 26 digit hex code. From Christmas '09 'til about the middle of June this setup acted as a normal network. One of the XP machines I use as a print server for a Samsung Laser printer, another is a print server for an Epson color printer and the other wired xp has a large USB external drive connected--that I back up all pcs to using xcopy and/or robocopy. During the above period I was able to do normal sharing and mapping of all the computers files and resources. Each computer could see all the others in windows explorer. Then, with no changes to the network on my part, windows 7 went stealth and blind. The XP machines could not see it and it could not see the XP machines. I been googleing and trying various suggestions but nothing seemed to work. I disconnected all but one XP and the Win 7 machine from the network. Swapped routers, changed network names. Added IPv6 protocol to xp adapters. Removed all vestiges of security suites on these 2 computers and took down their windows firewalls. Still, they couldn't see each other. Each was able to ping the others Ip address. I decided to try the following. For what all I can remember it may have been suggested by another poster on numerous googled posts I've visited in the past month *********************WORKAROUND!! On win 7 machine I mapped the IP address plus folder to a drive letter e.g. \\192.168.1.10\c\mine and sure enough I was able to access that folder on the XP machine. Did the same for the XP machine mapped \\192.168.1.11\users\public and it also worked. Now for the printer, after trying various things I found that going to the Win 7 Devices & Printers>add network printer "Click on Printer Not Shown" in shared printer by name enter the ip address of your XP printserver. Mine is \\192.168.1.10\SamsungM and sure enough it connects and is printing. To further test, I did the same for the IP address of the XP machine that has the epson. It works tonight. CAUTION!! One thing working for me in this workaround is the ability of my router to reserve and IP address for a particular computer name & mac address. The XP with the laser and the win 7 laptop are shut down each evening. This has been working for the past week, but I would really like to be able to see 7's shares in the XP's windows explorer and the XP's shares in the windows 7 explorer like I was able to for 6 months.