Hi. I have a windows xp home machine connected through ethernet to my dsl router. This is the machine that I want to share files from.
My laptop is running windows xp pro. Sharing files is easy, but I want to make it so that not just anyone who has access to my network has access to the shared files on the xp home machine. I'd like to give access to a certain remote user for certain directories. I've read that you can't do this with xp home but if you boot into safe mode(which I've done) you get the more robust interface with the myriad of permission choices. But I still can't figure out how to get it working, even from safe mode.
I tried creating an account on the windows home machine that's the same as the account on the laptop that I would use when I tried to access the directory and I tried giving permissions to that user, but it didn't work.
Is there a way to get xp home to play here?

I got this from the Microsoft website. Unfortunately, you cannot disable simple file sharing on XP Home so herein lies your problem. I will search!

EDIT: I found this WIKI on how to disable simple file sharing for XP home.

It sounds legitimate (never had a problem with wikihow) but I personally have never tried it due to my lack of an XP Home machine. You can give it a try.

Yeah, that's what I did. I logged into safe mode and fiddled with the permissions.
What I tried to do was give access to a user on that machine, then I created a user with the same name on my laptop, because I read somewhere that you could log in over the network if the name on the remote computer matched an account name on the computer you're trying to login to. But it didn't work, I got an access denied. But I don't really understand windows permissions all that much so I could have been doing it wrong.

Also, I'm not sure if I should have posted this in this forum or the windows forum.

Technically this counts as networking so I would say you are fine, but I am not a mod...

The same username thing usually only applies to a Vista machine trying to connect to an XP machine (thats what I do).

I guess you really can't disable simple file sharing in windows xp home. Because I just tried to reverse it. On my laptop, which is running xp pro, I made a share available and made it accessible only to an account which exists on the laptop and on my xp home machine. I accessed the file through that same account with no problem from the xp home machine. I guess I just have to deal with the lack of security or find some other secure way to share files.
Thanks for the help InsaneVr6.

I think I'm just going to use zone alarm firewall to restrict access to my computer by giving access to only the computers I want in the "trusted zone". In case someone comes across this thread, this might be a solution for them too.

You could do that with zone alarm and be fine.

I feel your pain though. That is why they made XP Professional more wireless 'adept' with security, connections, and permissions. XP Home can't do it easily and even if there was a way, im sure it wouldn't be the same.

Good luck to you.

You're stuck with limited solutions with XP home because you're stuck with Simple File Sharing (SFS).. here's why

When a client wants to access files on the server there's essentially two steps to authentication and access
1) Authenticate a remote user's logon to the server then
2) The server assigns the user request the permissions associated with the user's logon id (as defined on the server) to determine user's access permissions to files/folders on the server

Simple File Sharing (SFS) authenticates any and EVERY client request using the Guest account. So every client request gets the the same permissions associated with Guest. Therefore, there's no way to differentiate between requests from different users (or different client computers)

When you turn SFS off (which you can do for a server machine running XP Pro but not XP home) THEN the server authenticates each user logon with the same userid as running on the client which is why you could (in that case) differentiate permissions based on user id

Doesn't solve your problem.. but hope that explains why it works as does