cyberpyr8

Michael, You need to probably enable "normal" XP sharing. To do that Go to Control Panel/Folder Options/View/Use Simple File Sharing (Recommended) and TURN THAT OPTION OFF!!! I know it says that it is recommended to have that option on, but to accomplish this sharing you need to disable that feature. Then you should get the ability to login as another user other than guest. You could enable the guest account, but this is too dangerous to do. Disabling simple file sharing works better and is much more secure. The last thing I would suggest to make it easier is to set the administrator account (or Mariam - an admin) passwords all the same. This way if you login to your PC as Mariam and the remote PC has the same Mariam account and password it will simply cache the login and pass you right through. I do this in small offices where they do not have an Active Directory server. This way you can get onto any PC using the admin account without having to remember 5-6 passwords.

By default drives are assigned the driveletter$ share. In your case D$. You could get to them by typing \\computername\d$. You have to have admin rights on that remote computer to do that. There really isn't any other way to get to remote drives through the network without sharing it somehow. The other way to see it would be remote desktop or VNC.

Do you have it setup to use NAT? In the VM properties you will see Ethernet NAT. It will use DHCP to assign the VM an IP.

You could test to see if DNS is passing it the resolution(obviously it is, but this will tell you if your hosts file is correct) by setting no DNS servers. If you are using DHCP, disable it and manually give yourself an IP, subnet and default GW, but no DNS servers. Try pinging the names and see if you get the 127.0.0.1. That will verify your hosts file is working. You sure that your hosts file isn't named wrong (host.) or that you didn't add an extension to it somehow? Just a few things to try.

I created a slipstream version of WinXP SP2 and it saves a lot of time. The easiest way to do it is to get Autostreamer from Neowin.net http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=223562

On my server that I load batch files from I don't have any .bat setting. However, there is a .* setup for MIME type application/octet-stream. Our server prompts the user to save or run when they click on a .bat file.

That is weird! But this might help you: http://support.mpccorp.com/downloads/boot.html They have some boot disks. I would think it would be easier to just add a floppy temporarily to load the OS. I believe in 3.51 it was actually HTFS (High Tech File System?) and I know that it is not compatible with Windows 2000 and above. It has to be converted to NTFS first. If you install the 3.51 in a seperate partition and then load 2003 on a different partition, I don't see why that wouldn't work. I don't think that you will be able to read from one partition to the other though. It is similar to the way that if you dual boot a Windows 95 partition and a Windows NT 4 NTFS partition the Win95 OS couldn't read the partition with NTFS on it.