I was at work today and a customer wanted to network their two computers together. They didnt have the router yet so I connected them with a crossover cable. I set their IP addresses and subnet. Put them on the same workgroup and did network setup wizard. When i tried to map a network drive from the other computer it would not work. I could see the other computer when browsing "view workgroup computers" but it would give me the "this computer cannot access WORKGROUP; please check administrator permissions blah, blah" when i would try to browse it. Just wondering if anyone has an idea what was wrong.

XP Home or Pro?
Either way, did you try a reboot...both systems?

xp home. i tried everything. i finally gave up and told them to go buy a router now and I just set them up for DHCP, so hopefully it should work now, just wanted to know for future reference.

Is anything shared on either computer?

A way to get around this networking issue is to map an administrative share to the other computer. Let's say you want full access to the C drive on PC2 from PC1. From PC1 map a network drive manually. Use the path \\computer_name\C$ and be sure to use a username & password existing on PC2. Check the box that says reconnect at logon also.

There's a registry edit that will get around the networking issue also. Need to find that little sucker

would i need to enable netbios since it was not using dhcp?
and is the reg key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa
DWORD KEY "restrictanonymous" = 0 ?

Is SP2 installed? Try disabling the windows built in firewall if it's not installed.

yes sp2 was installed. I had file and printer sharing on the exclusion list. I didnt try turning it off though, so ill try that next time too

That's the key

Netbios is not needed in an XP environment. The only time I install it is in a hybrid environment with Win98 systems that use it. However, should you install netbios and it works, cool.