Weird printer sharing issue - XP and Win7

Although your solution might work for most cases it still won't work for mine.
My XP computer does not have a firewall or any script blocking program but for some reason whenever I try to access anything on it it requests username and password. I have checked the permissions and they all have everyone with full control. Not sure what's going on. I might need to reinstall Windows or just bite the bullet and upgrade.
As for the printer issue, I solved it by buying a wireless printer. No more connectivity aggravation. All 5 computers now print properly without fuss.

FayeC

mlctulsa - thanks but I've also tried that solution from Jimbo, which is posted everywhere on this site. (Though my problem with W7 and Vista, unlike Fayec (W7/XP). My W7 computer tells me "invalid path", "access denied" and similar mesages when I attempt to create the fake local printer.

Fayec - have you tried enabling the guest accounts on the computers that won't connect/print together? I just browsed through the thread and didn't see anywhere if you'd tried that.

I was hoping if you'd found a solution, Fayec, maybe it'd work for mine, even tho we're different systems!

Hey y'all,
I just spent several hours yesterday trying to get an XP laptop to print using a printer attached to a Windows 7 desktop. After hours of trying the "local port" method described all over sevenforums.com I tried telling the XP to use the more obvious network printer option. It worked fine! My only problem was choosing the correct printer from the drop-down list in the program that i was trying to print from. There were about 8 choices listed after all my shenanigans, but the proper one was actually the one that said USB on it.

Hope this helps somebody!

Faye,

Are you using forward slashes instead of backslashes? This could be the issue. Check back to jimbo's tip.

Parawood

FayeC said:

Hi,

I have 5 computers networked. 3 are Win 7 and 2 are XP Pro SP3.
The printer is connected to an XP machine and can be seen by all computers.
They are all in the same workgroup.
The 2 XP computers can share the printer normally and as long as the machine with the printer is on I can print without problems.
The 3 Win7 machines cannot.
I have tried all tricks I found here. I added the printer to Win7 as a local printer and added a local port that points to the XP machine (//XPComputer/Printer). That didn't work either and it seems to be the way people get it to work between XP and Win7.
I tried adding a network printer and although it sees the printer in the printer list, it hangs adding the printer or after adding the printer I get error 0x0000000d or 0x00000716. I looked these up but couldn't find anything that helped me solve the problem.
There seems to be some sort of authentication issue between the XP machine and the Win7 ones.
One tidbit of information, the XP machines are both using NetBEUI. Not sure if that is causing the issue or not. Haven't tried to disable it.
Has anybody fixed anything similar??
Any help is appreciated.

Thanks,

FayeC

FayeC

I found a (fairly obvious to me!) solution to my printer problem and thought maybe it might help you as well, if it's something you haven't tried.

Don't know why I didn't try this before, except that I didn't want more than one account on my computer, but...

Printer is on Vista 64-bit system (my computer).
Wanted to wireless print from a Windows 7 computer (my husband's computer).

I created an account on my computer with the same log in and password as the one he has on his W7 computer.

Then I installed the printer, again, on his computer. Worked.

I hope that helps someone!