finally got XP to see VISTA

turn off all firewalls, open WIDE all permissions on all machines, turn
on network discovery in vista and allow all the checkmarked items in the
pic below and don't allow password protection.
make sure XP has this protocol installed: link-layer typology discovery
(see pic below)


*RISK? ohhhh yeaaaaaa*
A network that you know who will using the resources? no problems


good luck, this works great for -ME-
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-AFTER FILES MOVED THRU THE NETWORK I _TURN_OFF_ ALL SHARING-


+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
|Filename: Capture2.JPG |
|Download: http://www.vistax64.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=14677|
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+

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pacinitaly

SpellCherkers aren't worth a shirt

Although Vista has the worst networking, from a user perspective, of any
Microsoft OS ever you should see Vista on an XP machine if printer and file
sharing are turned on in the Vista machine without doing anything to your XP
machine. Something is amiss in your setup that has nothing to do with the
abomination that is Vista.
Seeing the Vista computer on the XP computer is entirely different than
being able to open files from the Vista machine on the XP machine, however.
IMHO the worst thing about sharing files on Vista is the ridiculous settings
tree to allow sharing permissions and the fact that arbitrarily, although
the settings have not been changed from one session to the next, the Vista
machine may refuse to share the file over the network for no apparent
reason. Curiously I have never seen this happen with the "Public" folders
whose permission settings are never arbitrarily forgotten or ignored. This
is either a bug or Microsoft's heavy handed way of forcing users to share
files the way Microsoft wants them to instead of the way the user wants to
share files.
My other least favorite but is that every one of my wireless Vista units
will intermittently demand the router be reset in order to connect although
other Vista and XP units are connected wirelessly without problems. I have
never, ever seen a wireless XP unit do this unless the problem was actually
in the router.
Win7 machines can all share a code and p2p networking sets itself up
automatically like it should (all machines must run Win7, otherwise it is
the same old Microsoft crud).