My Documents not shareable

[AlanT]

I'm finding it imposible to see the My Documents folder over an XP Pro peer-to-peer network, even though other folders share normally. I have read the excellent "Windows XP Professional File Sharing" article, and investigated all the settings in NTFS file permissions, but I'm still not able to see My Documents from another PC. The setup is:

Both drives are formatted with NTFS.
I have removed simple file sharing from both, and checked that both users have full rights to My Computer on each other's machines both in Permissions and Security.
The situation is thus: First machine is called Lucy, second machine is called Barry.
Both have "my documents" fully shared. Barry's also has Sage folder shared.

On Lucys machine (signed on as Lucy, a power user) Sage is visible and all files can be opened. Clicking on Add a new network place reveals Barry\my computer is visible, but clicking on the + next to it does not reveal the files within. If it is added an "Access denied" message is shown. On Barry's machine, signed on as Barry(administrator) or Lucy, Lucy's "My Documents" is not accessible.
I have also made an account called Admin on both machines which has Administrator rights. The My Computer files on both Lucy and Barry machines are visible to Admin across the network even though the rights are identical to those of Lucy and Barry!

[DynamO]

I had a similar problem recently.. what I had to do was enable Netbios over TCPIP in the WINS section of the configuration of Nic card. After rebooting, I was able to see my shares over the network.. hope this helps..

[AlanT]

Not as simple as that I'm afraid - something I'd already checked!
The problem sems to be that the user "Lucy" on one machine is not recognised as the same person as "Lucy" on the second machine. According to Microsoft the user name is held as an encypted number on each machine which is generated at the time of setting up the account and is not accessible or editable. Thus the only way to give anyone access to My Computer is to make it available to the Everyone group, which rather makes a nonsense of Xp's supposedly superior security. This would then be no different to the "everyone can see everything" approach of windows 98. Does anyone know a better way?

[DynamO]

Hmm.. If that is the case, the only thing that may make sense is to create a new profile for Lucy on all the machines, and delete the old one.. see if that works. ThoughI don't believe it can be called by the same name (Lucy), even if you delete the old one first. I seem to recall reading that somewhere..
Good luck..

[AlanT]

OK, I've solved the problem by deleting the Lucy account and recreating it, then copying all the user documents and settings back over. Now My Documents becomes visible.
What had happenned was this -I had made a user Lucy on one machine, but called her Lucy Miller on the other machine. Realising it might not think this was the same person I changed the name to Lucy Miller on both. However, I think the string which denotes Lucy was not changed internally when I changed the name, so although the logon showed Lucy Miller, the pc still thought the user Lucy was trying to access files to which only Lucy Miller had access.

[DynamO]

Great.. glad to see you got it working.. When you create profiles, it will create the personal folders under that profile.. I can understand why Lucy could not access Lucy Miller's files and vice versa.. happy networking...