Network Sharing - requiring login, still can't connect

So, my new work laptop arrived today, and it appears I'm going to be my office's guinea pig for testing Windows 7.

Initial setup seems to be going pretty well, but we're having one issue with accessing other computers on the network, as well as shared network drives.

(Apologies in advance for what may be anachronistic terminology - I don't have the laptop in front of me to give the current names for things, and I never really adopted Vista, so I may be a couple revisions old (or older) in my nomenclature.)

When viewing the computers on my network, all the machines show up, but when I try to access any of them, I am prompted to enter my username and password. There are two problems with this: 1) Sharing is set up on these machines so this shouldn't be required to access shared files (i.e. all of the XP and Vista machines in the office are able to access these resources without authentication), and 2) Even if I enter my username and password, I am still denied access.

I'm guessing this is probably a basic setting that just needs to be switched, but I'm new enough to Win7 that I'm not sure what to be looking for.

Also, apologies if this has been covered in another thread/FAQ. I went through about a half dozen different networking threads trying to find an answer, but nothing seemed to fit the issue I was having.

Thanks!

We found the problem. :) There was a discontinuity between the password set up on the local machine, and what was needed to logon to the network.