I've looked through the various problems but have not come up with a solution for this one:

I'm trying to access my laptop (running Fedora) from my XP machine. I can see the laptop server in Network connections but no matter how I configure the server (USER or SHARE for security) I can not log in. It just returns the log in dialog each time.

If I use SHARE it comes up with SERVER\Guest greyed out and asks for a password. This has me stumped!

I think the problem may be with running an smb server on both machines, but I want to look both ways if you get my drift. I can access the windows shares on my xp machine from my laptop all the time. I just can't get back the other way.

Sounds like a username/password issue. Did you use smbpasswd to copy your linux username password to samba?

smbpasswd username

I seem to always forget this step.

Thanks for the reply, I managed to get it working and I think it may have been along those lines