I have a question about the default administrative shares in XP, if anyone knows the answer..

Is it possible to access the administrative share on a computer that is NOT on a domain from a computer that is on a domain? Or for that matter, from 2 computers that are not on a domain? I can access the administrative share of my laptop (on my companys domain) from my home pc, but the reverse will not work.. I think some security / network settings are modified when a computer is joined to a domain, I just need to figure out what those settings are, so I can allow my non-domain computer to be accessed by administrative shares.

Usually you would think you could force the machine to log in as a local user on the remote machine, but, it seems, that at least in XP, it won't let you do this by default. Either it will completely gray out the user name (with Guest as the default), or it won't allow you to use the remote machine / user (REMOTEMACHINE\Administrator)..

Any ideas?

Why can't you just join that computer to the domain and be done with it?

One of the main reasons for joining a domain is so that the adminstrator group on the domain has access to its administrative shares.

Are you trying to work it out so that you can have admin privileges on the local box, yet still participate in the domain? That's easy, just add DOMAINNAME\domainuser to the local box's administrators group after you've joined it to the domain. That way the box is part of the domain, and you can log in with your domain account and still have full access to the box itself.

I don't want to join my local box to the domain because of the incredible amount of overhead / extra programs that get run / installed for machines that are placed on our domain. It is merely a question of curiosity, as I believe it should be able to work. As I can map to the c$ share on my machine that is on the domain from my computer that is not on the domain, but the inverse will not work..

because of the incredible amount of overhead / extra programs that get run / installed for machines that are placed on our domain.

Ewww, yuck, I don't do that on our domain. No extra crap gets force-installed from my domain. If my end user wants his machine to be clean, I encourage it. I feel for ya.