I have a new Sony Vaio Laptop and a Sony Vaio tower that is about a year old. I want to network them together using a crossover cable so that thew laptop can share the printers set up on the tower. I have complete access to the laptop through the tower and the laptop can see the tower, but the tower won't allow me access, it says "access denied please check permissions with administrator". They were both running xp home, but I have now upgraded them both to xp pro with sp2 to see if it would solve the problem, but there is no change. The logins on both are administrator accounts. I've had two separate engineers look at them and they are stumped. Any ideas, I'm desperate! heatherjackson@eurotechdirect.com

If you have a firewall, turn it off until you get the network up. If you can ping from Desktop to Laptop & vice versa then check you have shared the drives /printer. Not a lot left after that. Regards. Bob Mitchell.

If Bob Mitchell's advice doesn't lead to your complete success, check out Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 318030 “You cannot access shared files and folders or browse computers in the workgroup.” Terry

Thanks for your comments, but I've done all that aswell as simple file sharing and still no joy. If you have any other ideas please let me know. Cheers heatherjackson@eurotechdirect.com

You had this exact "one way only" problem with XP Home, and then upgraded to Pro, correct? I had a similar problem with XP Home that after 3 weeks of effort and 3 hours of paid time with Microsoft I finally decided that the 'denying' PC was somehow corrupted. "Fixed" it by reformat and clean install. Read about some of the gory details in http://forums.techguy.org/t344973.html Terry