Personal folders visible on network

[Holy Moses]

I am having a weird issue.

I have a network with 3 PC's and 2 PS3's.

1. My PC-Win 7

2. Roommate's-Vista Home Premium

3. His girlfriend's- Vista Home Premium

I have enabled sharing on all the external HDD's that are connected to my Win 7 machine. All sharing and security has been set accordingly, and works perfect......

except for some reason, my USER folder "Jay", is completely visible to both Vista machines.
When I access the Network folder on my Win 7 machine, only the Public folders are visible on the two Vista machines.

The strange thing is that when I look at the properties of "Jay" folder, it shows it as being shared, yet in the Advanced sharing window, "Jay" is NOT shared. "users" folder is shared, so I am assuming this is why "Jay" is shared as it is a sub-folder of "users".

And when I look at the permission settings for "Jay", only myself and SYSTEM had permissions.

Now, I managed to workaround this by adding another permission rule to the "Jay" folder. I added NETWORK and set it to DENY straight across the board.

So now, my roommates can still see my USERS folder, but cannot access it.
This, however, is NOT ideal, as this also blocks them from seeing/accessing my PUBLIC folder. I only set the NETWORK deny permissions on "Jay" folder, yet ALL network sub-folders of USERS are blocked.

I have been up/down/thru/around my folder and permission settings for my Win 7 machine, and cannot figure out why that folder "Jay" was visible and being shared, and is still being shared.

Is this a hole in Win 7 security I have found, possibly? Or am I missing something completely obvious?

I can't get the Public folder visible and accessible, without exposing the "Jay" folder to all network users. And if I stop sharing "users", I can't get the Public folder visible.

 

[chev65]

Sounds to me like you set up a Homegroup with mixed Op systems which it really was not made for. For some reason doing this seems to allow the User folders on the Win 7 machines to be shared out, you havn't mentioned if you set up a Homegroup or Workgroup so I can only guess at this?

If you want more control over whats being shared then don't use Homegroups for a mixed OP system network, you should leave the Homegroup on your Windows 7 machines and then set up a Workgroup instead.

 

[Holy Moses]

My HomeGroup is "ready to create"

My Win 7 PC and one Vista machine are in "STR8UPMENACE" workgroup.
The other Vista is in "WORKGROUP" .....workgroup.

I just recently re-installed my OS and made sure to not create a HomeGroup, as I already knew about mixing HomeGroup with other OS's.

I have actually noticed this for a while, even before re-installing my OS. I just never actually went to their PC's to try and access my folders until recently. I assumed that "Jay" folder would have the proper permissions set to stop others from going into it.
I just found out that they have had the ability to browse my folder for sometime.

The issue was never a real concern, nor is it now as there is nothing "secret" to worry about, I am just trying to find out why.

I do have it blocked now, like I said not ideal though.

 

[wdonbrown]

I wish there was a solution to this. I've been trying to solve the same problem. My personal user folder is accessible by other computers in our network. While I want the Public folder shared, I do not want my personal folder shared. When I right click the folder's properties it shows as shared. When I highlight the folder and right click sharing and say 'share with nobody' the system begins to work and I get the feeling its trying to restore the folder to not being shared. But other pcs still have access. I cannot have the public file shared and not sure the other user files. I have also gone to the manage route by right clicking computer and "manage" but under shares I see not option to stop sharing.

 

[wdonbrown]

I stumbled on the following after reading an post on a related issue that indicated it was a network problem. Now, my personal user folder is no longer shared.

This is what I did: Go to Network and click on the icon representing my Windows 7 PC. The directory then showed my "Public" folder as shared and "Users" folder as shared. I right-clicked "Users" folder, highlighted "share with" and then clicked "advanced sharing". Then I selected the option that indicated not to share or share with nobody (I actually forget exactly what the option said). After I checked my Personal User folder, right-clicked, chose tab for Sharing and now under Network Path is says "not shared" AMEN! I checked the access from a Windows XP PC on our network and it can still read files in my Public folder but can no longer access my personal folder.