I am on a fairly large network and I turned off simple file sharing so I could have more control of permissions. It is not plausable to create an account for each person to log in, but I cannot seem to allow people to access shares anonymously. I have tried putting anonymous_users permission in the shared folder, and I have tried adding it and the guest account to have access remotely using the security settings>local policies>user rights assignments>access this computer from the network. It still does not allow them to log in. Before I turned on the guest account and allowed anonymous users access it would prompt people for a password to log on to access a list of shares. Then I enabled the guest account and got the "logon failure the user has not been granted the requested logon type at this computer" error. Then I tried allowing the anonymous users access and now anyone trying to access the list of shares get the "access is denied" error. I am out of ideas! All I want to do is allow EVERYONE access to a list of my shared files, and then have individual permissions on those files, like for instance one folder would allow anyone without a password access, but another folder would need an account to open.

I managed to get it to list shares after some more tweaking in the policy editor, but I can access shares with the anonymous permission, but the folders without it give the client an access denied error without prompting for a username.