Yes this could possibly do it also, try this first and then test, if it doesn't work then proceed with what I suggested.

I tried editing the WinXP registry as you described. Nothing changed. I the tried modifying smbpasswd as you described. Still no change. Yes, I rebooted WinXP after editing the registry and after modifying smbpasswd and yes I restarted samba after modifying smbpasswd.

If I run iptabled -F and discover that it isn't the firewall messing things up after all, can I then put the firewall rules back? If not, how can I back up my firewall rules so as to restore them if necessary?

About my network... Two computers plugged into a netgear router. WinXP through a Realtek ethernet card, Jack through a Netgear wireless card. Both connect through DHCP though both have IP addresses reserved for them. No WEP encryption. Both can access the internet through the router. Jack can access shares on WinXP, but not vice versa.

To reset your iptables to their saved defaults
service iptables restart

Depending on your setup you may have an additional script that is run too.

ok, now add this to your smb.conf

lanman auth = yes

then restart everything and try again

I added lanman auth = yes to smb.conf. Still no change. I then ran "iptables -F" tada! WinXP can see all the shares on Jack, but...

When I try to open a share, I am prompted to enter a password. Unfortunately, I the user name is permanently set to guest so none of my passwords work.

Fortunately, I was able to fix this problem by changine my security on Jack from share level to user level. But...

When I enter a username in WinXP and the correct password, I am prompted for a username and password again. Indefinitely. This may have something to do with WinXP automatically prefixing the username I enter with the computer name (i.e. "BONNIE\bkay", where "bkay" is the username and "BONNIE" is the name of the WinXP machine). Help?

Also, I'm guessing I don't have much of a firewall right now. Could someone point me to a good tutorial on how to add rules to the firewall?

Problem resolved!

I deleted smbpasswd and recreated it manually, from scratch. Now I can access files on Jack from WinXP , and WinXP doesn't try to prefix the username with the machine name. A happy ending

Still hoping someone will point me to a firewall tutorial.

Thanks to everyone who helped!!!

go here, this is the fix like you found, I will explain it after the first post, it has to do with th wonderful microsoft team and how they constructed their Secure Message Blocks. but check with this thread I'll explain EVERYTHING lol

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...threadid=56693

Hi kc8tbe,

Can you describe what you meant by "I deleted smbpasswd and recreated it manually, from scratch"? Did you recompile Samba?

shouldn't you change security option na samba.conf file to "user" ...?

What has xp not adding the machine name as a prefix? I had to use a work around of creating linux user name and samba share names same as xp machine name. This by the way made me have to chainge some xp machine name to linux acceptible names (red hat9) ie no numbers first no capitals etc. By the way red hat 8 wasnt restricting me that way.