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.

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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