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Recently, I got a laptop with Windows Vista installed. On my home network file sharing is enabled on each computer. I share a couple of folders on each computer in order to easily access and transfer files between computers.

For security reasons, it's important to share a certain folder especially intended for filesharing, instead of just your C:\ drive for example. This way you can control which files are accessible from another computer. This way you have total control which files on your computer are exposed to the outside world.

At home I make use of a workgroup with the following name: home. It's important that each computer is also a member of the workgroup home, otherwise you can't share files between all of your computers in your home network.

With my Windows Vista laptop I had some trouble sharing files, because Windows Vista's file sharing security is better than on Windows XP or Windows 2000. On my Windows Vista I was able to 'see' the shares on my XP and 2000 machines, however I was not able to see my Windows Vista shares on my Windows XP and Windows 2000 computers.

On my Windows Vista laptop I granted user 'Richard' with administrator rights access to these shares. This is an essential step when you share a folder. Also I gave the user 'Everyone' and 'Guest' and 'Anonymous Logon' rights to these shares (but this was really not necessary, as I realised later on). Still, on my XP and 2000 machines I was not able to access Vista's shared folders.

In Windows Vista's networking center all settings were correct: my network had local and internet access, networking detection was enabled, file sharing was enabled, sharing public folders was enabled (this is actually only necessary when you want to share your public folders), printer sharing was enabled (this is not really necessary for file sharing) and sharing with password protection was also enabled.

The Windows firewall on my Vista laptop was also enabled (which is no problem in case in the Windows firewall settings on the tabpage 'Exceptions' the file- and printersharing setting is 'checked', because then the Windows firewall is not blocking file- and printersharing).

The cause of the problem of not being able to access my Windows Vista's shares was because in Windows Vista's networking center, sharing with password protection was enabled. I quickly found out that when this setting was disabled, I was able to access my Vista shares on my XP and 2000 machines. However, I rather have a good security, that's why I turned it on again and I quickly found out that the user 'Richard' on my Vista laptop must also exist as a user with the same name and same password on my XP and 2000 machines.

After having user 'Richard' on both my Windows Vista and Windows XP and Windows 2000 machines, I was still not able to access my Vista shares. I wondered how this can be. The reason was that my user 'Richard' didn't have a password. After setting a real, non-empty password for user 'Richard' on all my machines, Vista's shares became visible on my XP machine (after logging of from Windows and logging on again on my Vista and XP computers).

Unfortunately, on one of my Windows 2000 computers, I still was not able to see Windows Vista's shares. I suspected that I needed to install the latest Windows 2000 service pack 4. Indeed, after installing this service pack on my Windows 2000 machine, Vista's shares also became available on my Windows 2000 machine.

On my Windows XP and Windows 2000 machines, I run ZoneAlarm as a firewall. My experience is that this is a great firewall. It's important that ZoneAlarm is not blocking traffic to and from ip numbers in your home networking range (which is in my case the ip range between ip numbers 10.0.0.150 and 10.0.0.153). I added this ip range to the trusted zone in ZoneAlarm. In case you suspect your firewall is blocking filesharing, try shutting down all of your firewalls in your home network and figure out which firewall is blocking the filesharing in your home network.

Author is a professional software engineer and has over 10 years of software development experience.

For more information visit his site http://www.software-secrets.com.

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Domainer