I had already posted this on answers.microsoft.com but was advised there to post it here, so here it goes:

I set up a Windows 8.1 computer to act as a VPN server (using Window's built in PPTP server) so that I could connect to my home network when I am elsewhere and be able to access shared folders in that network. I set up the server and everything seemed to work fine. I created a new incoming connection, checked the "Through the Internet" box, made sure IPv6 wasn't selected and disabled the automatic DHCP thing and replaced it with a range of IP's. I could connect to it a my external IP on the client machine changed to my home IP, but I couldn't see all of my network shares.

None showed up under the "Network" tab in Windows Explorer, but I could access some by manually typing in the IP, fine by me. But I also had shared folders that were on the computer acting as the VPN server, and I couldn't access those. I tried to ping the VPN server but nothing. I could ping other machines in the network but the ping request would always time out when I tried to ping the VPN server. The server could ping the client computer but the reverse wasn't working.

I can't seem to figure out why this is happening, I tried searching around online but I found a lot of people that did something that solved it but that when I do it, nothing changes.

Any help is greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance!

Have you checked your VPN servers firewall settings? If you're using Windows firewall then it would have a rule added to allow PPTP connections, but that doesn't mean that ICMP (ping) connections would be allowed.

In terms of the shares etc on the VPN server, I wonder if that's due to the sharing settings, eg the machine being set to allow sharing only to local machines on the private network rather than guest/public. While other machines on the network would see your connection as local (so allow you to access the shares), I'm not sure that the VPN Server won't recognise your connection as being external since it's the VPN endpoint, so it knows you're not local. On the VPN server, go into the Network and Sharing Center, then into Change advanced sharing settings, and if currently disabled then try enabling file and printer sharing on the guest/public network profile.