One way network traffic

[DeadheadDuke]

I have a small home office network consisting of 3 wired and 2 wireless computers. My router is a LInksys WRT54 GS. Two of the desktops are running on Vista and the other is still on Windows 2000 Pro. The laptop is running on XP Professional. One of the Vista computers uses Ultimate and the other uses Home Premium.

--Using either of the Vista machines I can see and transfer shared files to and from the other computers.

--Using XP on the laptop I can see all the other computers just fine. I can do the same from the Windows 2000 computer.

--Moving shared files between XP and Windows 2000 is no problem at all.

--The Vista computers are visible to the XP and 2000 computers as network shares but I am unable to access the Vista computers from the others. I get the standard message that "you may not have sufficient permissions for access. Contact your administrator......"

I have tried everything I can think of as far as shares and permission are concerned and I'm out of ideas.

I looked into local security policies and "Access this computer from the network". It shows all the necessary entries for the Vista computer itself and also lists my workgroup name. I thought perhaps I had to explicitly enter a user name and account for the other computers in the workgroup for them to get in but when I try to apply those names I get an Security Template error that says "An extended error has occurred. Failed to save Local Policy Database." Everything I was able to find about this error suggests that it is referring to a domain server problem, so I don't think it applies to me at all since I don't have a server and am not on a domain.

Can anyone offer a suggestion?

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

[fizban2]

how were the shares setup on the vista machines? did you use the easy sharing wizard or was the simple file sharing turned off?

[jcarle]

The XP and 2000 clients may be trying to authenticate as themselves instead of authenticating as Guest. I am, however, at a loss on how to change authentication methods in Vista. I don't even know if there's a group policy editor for Vista.