I was having problems getting my vista laptop working on my home network had the same problems you are having read lots of fixs on the net but it turned out to be norton firewall problem I had to put the ip address's of my other comps into my laptop norton firewall personal firewall - configure -trust control - trusted -then added ip's of all the comp on my network and presto network up and running I installed the Link Layer Topology Discovery (LLTD) Responder (KB922120) patch on my xp systems as well do not know if this will help you but it is all simpler then all the things I read