Vista - hi all! / opening vista folder in xp

hi! this is my first post and not surprisingly, it's about NETWORKING!

i am setting up a Vray Distributed Rendering Farm (producing a CGI Image with the resources of every PC available in my network) and I succeded. As you can imagine, sharing folders and acheiving the network between my XP pc and my Vista laptop was tedious, but manageable.

However, there is STILL one problem: i cannot open the shared folders from the Vista Laptop in my XP pc, but i can do it the other way around: I can access my XP folders on the Vista lap.

I've done it all:
-registry edit
-local security policies
-even installed a trial version of Network magic
-NTFS on both systems, of course
-disable firewall while testing
-editing network as a safe zone
-using vista's Public folder
-network set as private
-all options active on vista's networking

i was reading a solution to view xp folders on this forum (excellent solution by sachin, if i am not mistaken) but that post never got as far as my situation, so i'm halfway there.

if this solution is posted elsewhere, please forgive me, but i used the search tool and there are just SO MANY posts regarding networking that i might have not seen it.

any help is so appreciated.

thanx!!