Win 7 laptop requests username/password to access xp desktop

s8b said:

Thanks for your attention chev65. The sharing works normally sometimes. The problem is intermittent. To me this indicates that some setting is being changed dynamically. The problem is of recent origin. I did change routers recently, but cannot correlate the problem to that. I guess it could be worse.

I would definitely go through the steps to take ownership of the files on the XP machine.

Just because the problem seems to be intermittent doesn't mean taking ownership won't work. Nothing will change unless you make changes. :)