Be gentle with me, I'm a technoturkey! How I got this far amazes me!
The setup:
I have a Netgear wireless access point and router connected to my desktop machine by LAN cable. This router is 192.168.0.1 The Netgear unit is the DHCP server
All machines run XP, all patches applied. All have sufficient grunt, disk, etc
I've set up a second router, this time a Linksys, but with new firmware as a wireless repeater unit, with the same SSID as netgear. It's on 192.168.1.1. This is GREAT. I can roam. I needed this because my house has stupid walls that block signal, and I'm fed up with She Who Must Be Obeyed at All Times yelling at me because her mqachine just dot disconnected!.
The Problem:
After repairing my network connections on all connected machines, I can see within XP all machines connected to the (eg) Linksys, but not any connected to (eg) the Netgear unit.
I can ping from where I am (on ......1.4) to a machine on the netgear (....0.3) happily, and obviously tracert to it. Windows networking refuses to find it inside My Network Places) or by entering \\machinename at the start>run point.
I tried Add a network place. It "finds it", makes the connection after validating that it is shared (I know this because it refuses when a location is not shared), but, having found and added it, refuses to contact it!
All I want to do (!) is to share all my resources across my home network, sharing disks and printers as if they were on machine connected to the same, single router. And I wanttro be able to not care which physical router I'm connected to.
All ideas gratefully received. But please keep it newbie-simple!