I recently bought a Dell Inspiron Mini 10v with XP Home SP3 installed. XP Pro was not an option, unfortunately. The Mini does not have an optical drive. I have a Dell Optiplex desktop running XP Pro SP3 that does have a CD/DVD RW drive. I want to share the optical drive on the Optiplex so that I can access it from the Mini. When I try to access the drive, I get "Access is denied." The icon for the drive shows in My Network Places, but I get the error when I click to open it. I can access shared folders in both directions, and can print to the printer on the Optiplex from the Mini They are on the same workgroup with the same username and password. I have tried it with Simple File Sharing on and off for the source drive. The Windows Firewall has an exception for File and Printer Sharing on both PCs. I've tried it with both firewalls off, too. There is a CD with accessible files in the drive on the Optiplex. I tried it with the Mini in Safe Mode with Networking and it still did not work. I'm using a wireless network through my Linksys wireless router, just in case that matters. I searched this forum and MS TechNet with no result. Also, no answer to my post on TechNet. I am hoping this community can be more helpful. Anybody have any other ideas? Thanks

Map the drive, on that screen use a correct user on the pro. Pro user must have password. The cd drive has to be shared by that user too and they have to have enough permissions to be able to share drives. "Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, antivirus, anti-spyware, Live CD's, backups, Make an autorun.inf folder on all usb drives.

On the XP Home machine, I opened My Network Places, went to Tools -> Map Network Drive... I set the Drive letter to E:\ and browsed to the shared folder on the XP Pro machine that represents the optical drive. I clicked Finish. The drive is now mapped. This is definitely a step in the right direction. But, I still get "Access is denied." when I try to open the new E:\ drive. I am logged in to both machines with the same admin username with the same password. There is a valid disk in the drive. Thanks for that step! Any ideas from this point? Cormac Smith

You have stop on the map where you see a drive and then below use the connect as. "Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, antivirus, anti-spyware, Live CD's, backups, Make an autorun.inf folder on all usb drives.