Vista - Help: Vista and XP don't play together

Hi,

This morning I synchronized my Vista 32 Business SP1 laptop with my XP Home SP3 desktop.

After finishing some work on the XP desktop I want to re-synchronize data for tomorrow's presentation with the Vista laptop and all I get is an error message with a message that my Server Service is not started.

I have no idea why Microsoft thinks that every home user has their own personal network administrator, but anyway, I don't.

So I checked in Services.msc and, yes, Server Services are running. Just to check I paused and resumed, without any change.

A ping was good (6 ms) and net view sees all connected machines.

I go to the XP desktop and download some files from the laptop without problems. I try accessing the desktop from the Vista laptop and have no connection whatsoever.

What is a man supposed to do?

I got the files onto the laptop via memory stick - but that's not the point.

Any idea who is not playing fair here?

Thanks for any pointers.

//AndyB

PS: I read quite a few threads to see if I could learn something, but none seemed to cover this situation. If I have overlooked one, please accept my apologies.

Is it possible you have a firewall on your XP desktop?

Beyond that... do you have a shared folder on your XP desktop for Vista to dive into? Have you tried manually typing in the share path? Example: \\IP_Address_of_desktop\Share_Name

Those are my first guesses... if those don't work, we can possibly go from there. And, I'm sure others on the forum will have ideas of their own

Ensure there is no firewall (Windows firewall, antivirus firewall) blocking on XP. Also you need to enable simple file sharing or share file with user/group permissions to make it works.

Thanks for the suggestions.

Alas, my first sentence was indicating that it worked a couple of hours previously and then simply died.

But this opens an interesting question: if my firewalls are configured so that the fixed IP of my PC's are allowed to make contact and I can copy a file to the XP desktop from the Vista laptop, does this mean the other way around might be blocked?

Thanks for your thoughts and any further help is much appreciated.

//AndyB

Generally speaking, firewall rules are unidirectional. So... the answer to your question is YES. Your firewall could, indeed, be allowing traffic between the two in one direction but not the other.

No problem.

I always disable simple file sharing, at home and in the office. I've seen it cause too many problems, as many network applications are incompatible with it.