I personally have 2 machines, one running vista SP1, and the other XP SP3. There are various other computers on the network running xp and vista as well. what I am trying to do is share a folder with one or more specific computers without passwords and stuff. Essentially I want to share folders between my laptop and desktop and desktop computers, but don't want the folder to even be visible anywhere else. I have played around a bit with permissions, but it appears as though I need to be part of a domain to set access for other computers. I cannot imagine there is no way around this, or even a completely different way to do this. Basically, I want the folder on my laptop called "Files" to be visible and accessible to my desktop, but my roommate's computer cannot see, or access the folder "Files" Any suggestions?

User level access control.

Care to be a bit more specific?

Once you share folder on computerA, other computers in same workgroup will be able to see that shared folder, howerver you can set access control to control the access. Here are share file with user/group permission in XP or password protected file sharing in Vista articles, hopefully can help you.

Actually, I finally got it.. kinda.. I discovered if I added all the users in the work group to all the computers, using the same passwords, I was able to restrict what users access what folders in the network.