I have a small home network of four pcs setup in my home. 3 of them run win2kpro and the other runs XPpro. They are setup in a workgroup and share a printer, internet (dialup via ICS), and files near perfectly. Near perfect because, while the XP machine can access whatever file it wants to from any of the other machines, the 2kpro machines can only access files from the Xp machine sometimes. I get an error saying that the file might be in use. Often it happends if i try to copy and paste a file from my My Downloads directory ( I use DAP, could that affect it?) on the XP computer while on one of the 2k machines. I doesnt matter if I am accessing the file from a mapped network drive or through My Network Places. I do not get the error when copying a file from a 2k machine(though i use dap on them as well). Does anyone know the reason? Does XP have some sort of permissions set automatically on its files that makes them inaccessable to other networked computers? The strange thing is this does not occur 100% of the time. Any insight would be appreciated. Thanks ~Im_wink

XP pro has share level and permission level settings. Usually set the share level to full and restrict with access control list (permission) level. Also the folders can be set to deal with the files under it and by default installed to it. Don't know why you would use a download acc prog?

If the file is multimedia (MP3, AVI, etc.), and you use thumbnail/preview in Explorer, Media Player will grab it for its preview slider on the left of the window. Turn that mode off, and it should work. I believe there's a MS fix for this problem. Expert: someone who reads the manual when no-one's looking