I bought a new computer. It is shiny. It is fast. It is attached to my little home network. But my little home network does not work. My two XP machines have no love for one another. No, indeed they do not. I have been trying to make them speak to each other for two days. And now I am seething with a smoldering rage that threatens to combust into an incandescent homicidal mania.
All I want to do is share files from one computer to the other. Why is this so hard? I have found no shortage of advice and troubleshooting tips. I have tried to follow it all. What alarms me is how many people have this problem and how varied the “solutions” are. I have verified that both computers can see the net. I have enabled NetBIOS over TCP/IP. I have run the home networking wizard. I have poked the registry’s Lsarestrictanonymous bit. Thrice the brinded cat hath mewed, but still no joy. I have rebooted and three-finger saluted. I have IPCONFIG’d and PING’d. I have disabled firewalls and unplugged virus filters. I have renamed my workgroup and computers. And now, if only I could find someone remotely responsible, I would surely strangle them before it occurred to me to ask them for help.
Fortunately, venting my spleen by blog still works. I feel a little better. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go outside and smash something noisy with a great big hammer.
Rambles Blog at Star Chamber 
We had this problem too. I don’t remember how we solved it though. It was something about changing permissions… if I remember, I’ll let you know.
You should have got a Macintosh!
I knew I was setting myself up for that one…
Assign Static IP’s to both(be sure to reserve these addresses so they don’t get assigned to any other system you hook up on the network). Then you can just map a drive by IP address or create a share and access it by IP.
Or just enable Apple Talk ;^)