MarvWe said:
I work in a place with numerous technicians and I have the authority to ask them to help me, which I did. But without joy. I called them off after a day. They seemed to think that it was the failure of one of the Service modules.

So I formatted my C drive and reinstalled Windows. It took me almost a day to run all the updates and reinstall all of my apps. But now sharing works as advertised. And having tried so many times, I am now something of an expert on how sharing works, when it is working, so that part was easy.

Still, it is disappointing that a solution could not be found using this extended period of time and with access to all of the experts on this network. And also disappointing that the sharing system in Windows is so fragile.
Well since the Op never replied back with any useful information it would be rather difficult to solve the issue. In fact what little feed back I received was completely useless, I mean just look at the response.

The Op only followed one direction to uninstall Norton using the tool then gave up and asked for someone else to help, like that was the limit of my advice or something?

I think people need to realize that we solve things here by process of elimination, this requires feed back from the person with the problem, when zero feed back is given then there is also zero chance to solve the problem.

To fix this particular problem a person would need to go into the Windows firewall settings and reset to defaults. The firewall certainly did not mess itself up, it got that way from installing things like Norton and not returning the settings back to default. Unfortunately I never got a chance to give that advice due to lack of feed back.

Nothing fragile about sharing in Windows but you can blame the Op system if it makes you feel better.

It's the various A/V software that people install that cause the problems. :)