Sharing a folder in Vista for not-Vista visitors

...how?

Let me preface this by saying if you give me a switch, a bunch of cat5, and a mix of computers running anything from windows95 to xp pro (and everything in between) I can have shared folders on each of them accessible from every other in about 15 minutes.

But not Vista.

No, I don't want to put the folder in the shared documents location (or whatever special place Vista wants this stuff.) I don't think the computer should tell ME what to do.

No, I don't want to turn on "Everyone and their brother can access this folder without any security whatsoever."

What I !@$!@#$ WANT is user-level security (username and password) with the accompanying permissions options applied to a folder, any folder I choose, and I want to access it from an XP machine.

Except apparently that is just not possible. Can't be done.

Ridiculous.

( what I've done )

I created a folder on an a Vista laptop. I shared it via advanced sharing. I added a new account the vista machine that matched the credentials on an xp machine. I made that account an administrator on the vista machine. Under permissions for the sharing folder, I added "vistamachine/administrators" with full access, and that didn't work. So I added "vistamachine/newaccount" with full access. That didn't work. Finally I tried giving full access to "Everyone" and THAT didn't work.

I seriously love how everytime Microsoft tries to make something easier, it just gets ridiculously harder to do the same thing with SECURITY. This has been an ongoing trend ever since 98se, with the glory days of "This is acceptable" dying with 2k.

did you enable password sharing in the network and sharing center?

medo145 said:

did you enable password sharing in the network and sharing center?

Click to expand...

Didn't have the laptop available to check until earlier today -

Yes. Password sharing is enabled, the other 'share files' option is enabled (file and printer sharing?) but the "public folder" is not enabled, because of the aforementioned desire to have some security.

I've seen a lot of results via google about this same issue - XP etc can't access a vista share, but vista machines can. Unfortunately, I don't have a different vista machine to 'test' the share with.

Any ideas? Like I said, if the laptop was 2k or xp or 98 or etc, this wouldn't be any kind of issue - heck, *nix with samba, it wouldn't be a problem.

Does it just not show in "Network Neighbourhood" or is it totally inaccessible? I usually can't get XP computers to show my Vista shares in NN, but typing \\petteyg359\Music always loads up the shared Music folder just fine.

I can see the Vista machine (and share) just fine from the XP machine, and like I said I created a matching account on the vista machine... but trying to access that share results in "Access Denied."

try this on the vista machine

Add the following key to the registry. Use regedit and navigate to

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System

and add a new DWORD (if it doesn't exist) labeled LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy and set it's value to 1

restart and give it a try

I'll try that when I'm able, but... assuming it works, and even if it doesn't, can anyone explain to me why this isn't a perfect facepalm "oh it's Vista" example?

Did Microsoft not test file sharing between not-Vista and Vista, or did they purposefully make it hard to do in Vista Home Basic (which this is), or just Vista period, in the hopes that people would go out and buy a copy to "Fix" the broken old OS machine that evidently "Can't access the share." ?

It works fine for many people. I suggest dropping all your extra user accounts and permissions, and starting from a clean folder. Adding all the extra users and modifying permissions just complicates things. I have no extra user account or permissions set up on my system. When I want to share a folder:

Right-click
Properties
Sharing tab
Advanced Sharing (button)
Share this folder (checkbox)
OK (button)

If you want other people to have write access, then just click permissions and check the "write/modify" box before clicking OK. Works fine from my computer (Vista U) to three other computers all running XP, and on a laptop with Vista HP.

petteyg, the problem with not creating a new-for-sharing user account is that the one user account set up on the vista laptop has no password set, and windows is pretty crappy about validating password-less accounts in varying situations.

but whatever, i'm done with it. they also have an xp desktop set up in a different room, so i'll create the folder there and they can access it that way.

which is ack-basswards but YAY VISTA IS AWESOME!

THe ack-basswards thing is that you have no password set up for your account. Give yourself a password and half, if not all, of your shared folder problems will probably go away. Attempting to enable file sharing for a computer that has a passwordless account is just dumb, anyway, unless you really want people to be hacking your files.

Vista networking is a bit tricky, but its doable.

You have to have your home network set to home instead of public (public folders from being publically accessable)

Have a passworded account on the Vista PC.
After you do all the other settings, you have to disable simple file sharing. Right click the share and click the security tab.

In the security settings you will add the user, click checkname to resolve it and give them full control of the files.

Restart and it should be good to go. I am running only the HTPC in Vista right now (will be adding more later) and after mapping the network drives under alternate credentials on my XP boxen they have full access to the files.

petteyg359 said:

THe ack-basswards thing is that you have no password set up for your account. Give yourself a password and half, if not all, of your shared folder problems will probably go away. Attempting to enable file sharing for a computer that has a passwordless account is just dumb, anyway, unless you really want people to be hacking your files.

Click to expand...

a) It's not my computer.

b) The share mechanisms *I* set up all used passwords. The permissions explicitly applied to the shared folder in question involved a new passworded account, and the remote login was with that same passworded account.