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I've got a Vista Home machine that is not playing well with my XP workgroup. I originally tried to connect to a printer shared on an XP machine. Jobs from the Vista machine would cause an error on the printer. So I connected the printer to the Vista machine and shared it to the others. It would work fine when testing, but after some period of time the XP machines could no longer print or jobs would take 15 minutes plus to print. This is on a wireless network, but all the machines are within 10' of each other and signal strength is plenty strong. I know Vista Home doesn't work on Domains but I thought it would work fine with workgroups. Is there some trick to getting this to work or would I be better off upgrading to Vista Business or maybe is there an option to downgrade to XP Pro? This is a Dell 530 bought at Best Buy.

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Dani AI

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Good troubleshooting by — the usual culprits for this kind of intermittent printing are credential handling, driver/architecture mismatches, and network or power settings. The following steps are practical, low-risk ways to make a Vista host reliably share a USB printer with XP clients without changing OS editions.

Make authentication seamless: create a dedicated local account on the Vista PC for shared access and give it a password. On each XP client either create the same username/password or store the Vista credentials so the client logs on automatically. In XP you can open the stored credentials dialog with:

rundll32.exe keymgr.dll,KRShowKeyMgr

Or map the share and persist credentials:

net use \\VistaHost\PrinterShare /user:VistaUser MyPassword /persistent:yes

Driver and printer-share tips: if the Vista machine is x64 and XP clients are x86, install the 32-bit driver on the Vista host so clients can download it (Printer Properties -> Sharing -> Additional Drivers -> add x86). Keep printer drivers current on host and clients, and install the printer as a network device if possible (router USB print server or the printer's own network port) to remove the host as a single point of failure. If a specific driver causes errors, try a vendor-recommended alternate driver or uncheck bidirectional support in printer port settings.

Network and reliability checks: ensure File and Printer Sharing is allowed in Windows Firewall for the active network profile, disable AP/client isolation on the wireless router, and prevent the Vista host from sleeping while sharing. If name resolution is slow, connect by IP (e.g., \192.168.1.100\Share) to avoid NetBIOS delays. Upgrading to Vista Business is not required for workgroup sharing — it only adds domain-join capability.

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I finally figured it out. Vista requires authentication, which I knew, but also has an option under Networks & Sharing to not require password authentication, which to me means just a user name - no password required. Trying to keep things simple for my users that's what I chose. However, I had to have the XP user use a password and then authenticate each shared resource on the Vista PC then everything worked.
Also upgraded printer (HP P3005d) to the latest firmware which seemed to cure the printer errors caused by printing from Vista to the shared printer.

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