Hi,
I have two PC's directly connected to each other with a crossover cable, one is a WinXP Home and the other is CentOS 4.2. They are into a simple file sharing network and their IP addresses are static, manually configured (have had problems with DHCP on both machines).
Although there are no warnings regarding connection on both machines, when I try to use samba on CentOS machine to connect to the win machine I get a response that the connection failed. Likewise, on the win machine in the My Network Places I don't see shares from CentOS machines.
What is to be done to make this system work?

Um - not much info to go on. You could tell us how you are trying to connect? like have you edited smb.conf? What commands have you tried. What did you do when it said connection failed. Can you ping the other machine? Are you running any firewalls? Is any of the machines running a DHCP server so you get an DHCP assigned address. And anything else you have tried?

This might help you though

How to connect to a XP share from linux if the share is called 'dashare' and your username is 'whatthe' your password is blank, the workgroup is 'WRKGRP' and the XP ip is 192.168.0.1

1. make a directory to mount the windows share.
mkdir /mnt/dashare

2. The command to mount the windows share to /mnt/dashare:
mount -t smbfs -o username=whatthe,password=,workgroup=WRKGRP //192.168.0.1/dashare /mnt/dashare

3. View the share
cd /mnt/dashare
ls -las


To share a folder to windows read /etc/samba/smb.conf
and then ask if you get stuck on any of it.

Further:-
are you trying to connect by hostname or ip address only, If you cant ping by hostmane edit your /etc/hosts to reflect that.
If Xp is called PoopOS then in the /etc/hosts file have a line:

192.168.0.1 [TAB] PoopOS

the [TAB] indicates a Tab, don't type [TAB] into the line ;-)