Today I spent several hours trying to get filesharing between XP and 7 to work, and I'm about ready to drive out to Redmond and kick someone in the nuts. I have no idea why this is so difficult, I really don't. There's no call for it. I'd really appreciate it if someone could help out or if you have a link to a great resource on the topic. Here's what I encountered:

First, the environment: about 10 computers, half are on XP and half are on 7 (none on Vista, thank goodness). Many/most of the computers used to be on a domain, but they've abandoned that and slowly replaced computers without putting them on a domain. None of the 7 computers, I believe, were ever on a domain.

The general problem I'm having is that the Windows 7 computers can see each other, and the XP computers can see each other, but none of the 7 can see any of the XP. What the hell?

Here's what I've done so far on the 7 computers:
- destroyed anything to do with Homegroups
- In advanced sharing settings, I have everything set up the way it should be according to everything I've read: discovery on, file/printer sharing on, public folders off, 40/56-bit encryption accepted, password protected sharing off, user accounts and passwords selected

I was mostly given access to one XP machine, which was a bit of a mess. One thing I read said that nothing would work unless the Link Layer Topology Responder protocol was installed. It wasn't, and because SP3 was installed the only hotfix I found said it wouldn't install because it only worked with SP2. FU MS! I eventually found a workaround and installed it. But that only seemed to help slightly, and got me to the point where it was seeing other XP computers.

By the end of my visit to this place, I had gotten to the point where I could access any computer on the network from any other computer. HOWEVER! The only way this could be done on XP was to search for the computer. It wouldn't let me, for example, type \\computer12 in the run dialog, but if I went to search>computers>"computer12" it would find it and I could get in.

No matter what I did, I could not find a way to simply have Windows show all the computers on the network. Any suggestions? I'm really frustrated by this. I need to go back tomorrow and I don't know if I'm going to be able to fix the issue. Oh, and no, they will not be switching to Macs or installing Linux or anything like that