Ugh.

The situation: I set up a new computer for someone, and it's running Vista (home basic, I believe?). The computer it replaced is an XP machine, and for some reason they're keeping all their files and things on it. The problem is that file sharing is a nightmare. Accessing an XP computer from a Vista machine results in access denied errors and a mess of unknown error messages. Sharing between three XP machines in my own home is effortless. I share the folder, it shows up in My Network Places on the other computers, and I can access all the files and subfolders underneath. But on this computer, I shared a folder, and could access it, but most of the folders were giving me an "access denied" error.

Is there any solution to this?

Usually it's permissions issues on the folders (and the files contained therein).

The sharing would have had issues regardless of the OS, I'm thinking that the reason things worked before is that you had the same user account on both PCs before. And now, it's a different user account trying to access it from the new machine.

So in addition to setting the rights on on the share, you gotta set the rights on the folders and files too.

I can accept that as a reason, but frankly, how? One thing that has always annoyed me about XP is that the "Sharing and Security" tab should really just be called the "Sharing" tab. I see no place to ascribe specific security settings for a specific folder (at least, beyond "allow network users to change my files"). Am I correct in remembering Win2K as having this? Where do I alter this in XP?

I don't have xp in front of me right now but it was something like right click on the folder and hit Permissions or go to the properties box and hit security tab. In any case the screen I'm talking about has no sharing settings at all.

The "Sharing and Security" menu item opens the Properties dialog for the selected item, with the "Sharing" tab pre-selected. The menu item is definitely misnamed.

The Security tab is next to the Sharing tab on the properties dialog, unless you've got Simple File Sharing turned on. For more information, see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/304040

According to that, Simple File Sharing doesn't reset the security of pre-existing files. You'll get more flexibility (at the expense of ease of use) by turning off Simple File Sharing -- it's under Tools / Folder Options / View in Windows Explorer.

Note that this is mostly from memory -- I only have Vista and 2003 immediately available to me right now.

Ah, thanks. I think that's it, Roger. I don't have a Security tab. I'll try that out. Thanks guys.

*edit*
That did it. Before getting to the last point I was stuck at, I'd also made two other mistakes and corrected them. First, I tried to share the whole documents and settings folder, which you can't do. Then, in a similarly unallowable move, I tried going in and sharing each user's folder separately. That only works for the user you're logged in as. I then went and logged in as each user and shared their folders.

And believe me, I understand that this is in no way secure, but this is how the family wanted it.