Printer and Drive sharing with XP Home

I have a customer who had a Windows 95 machine sharing two printers with a Windows 98 machine. The 98 machine has Internet Connection Sharing installed. He has since replaced the 95 machine with an XP Home machine. XP Home connects to 98 with no problem, able to access drive shares, and use the shared Internet connection.

However, the 98 machine cannot connected to the drive shares or shared printers on the XP Home machine. Every attempt at connecting to the shares generates a dialog box asking for a password for IPC$!

The workgroup names are the same, and I've tried creating an account on the XP machine with the username and password of the 98 machine, but nothing works. XP does not allow NetBEUI to be installed! (No CD anyway, just a lousy restore CD)

Any suggestions?

First off try enabling the guest account on the xp box (as long as your not worried about permissions this is the easiest way to fix this problem). Next make sure your shares are setup properly. Thirdly yes you can install netbeiu with xp. You just have to have your install disk and go under X:\VALUEADD\MSFT\NET\NETBEUI (were X is your cd drive)

Make sure the XP box has a user account created that is IDENTICAL to the user account on the 98 box. e.g. If you have an account the on 98 box jsmith with the password set to "password". Then create one on the XP box using that combination and you should be all set.

You don't need the Guest account enabled to access file shares on the XP box.

Thanks for the suggestions. I've tried both of those already and neither one worked!

I think at this point I'm going to test the NIC's, Hub and cables (even though they worked before putting the XP box in), then blow away all the network settings and start over. I'm thinking the 98 box might have a corrupted TCP/IP stack or something.

Just a thought but is the problem related to XPs firewall being enabled on the network?

I think I disabled it, but I'm not positive.

I don't know about XP Home, but XP Pro has a networking wizard that you need to run. At the end of the wizard there is a chance to make a disk for other machines on your network. Unless you run that disk on every machine, the network will not work properly. I had a similar problem with my machines and this solved it. Hope this helps.

I had run the network wizard and used it on the old computer, but that didn't work.

I think the TCP/IP in the Win98 machine is wacked. Here's why...

I hooked up a WebRamp device (someone gave it to me) with the DHCP server turned on. The XP machine will get an IP from the WebRamp, and it will pull up the configuration page from it. I can ping it with no problem.

I hooked up the WebRamp to the 98 machine. It will get an IP from the WebRamp, but will not load the configuration page. I can ping 127.0.0.1, and the IP assigned to the 98 machine, but I cannot ping anything outside the machine. I swapped the NIC, I removed TCP/IP and re-installed.

I guess I'm going to have to reinstall windows and start from scratch...

Wow! What a nightmare this has turned out to be! I re-installed Windows98 on the 98 machine, got TCP/IP working correctly. Now I can connect to the Internet through the XP box, the both of the computers appear under Network, but I can't access any of the shares! When I try, it asks for a password for \\computername\IPC$!!!

On the XP Home box, under Event Viewer, I see a logon success showing the Guest account, but then a logon failure saying that the account has not been granted privelages!

Any more suggestions?

Thanks