Troubleshooting file and printer sharing in (yes, you read right) Windows XP

At my father's house where I'm currently staying there are two computers running Windows (one XP Pro, one XP Home). The XP Pro machine is dual-booting with Linux, but my father needs it to run mostly under Windows. They are connected and some folders are shared. The XP pro machine acts as a server, using ICS , for the other machine.

I've always had problems with the MS way of setting up network shares, because in many cases the errors that come up are obscure and the error messages aren't informative at all.

Since now there is NTFS write support for Linux (see http://www.ntfs-3g.org), I decided to convert the two FAT32 partitions on the server to NTFS.

There were two problems:

Quoting from Knowledge base article 304040:

Remote users may receive an "Access Denied" message on a share that they had connected to successfully before. This behavior occurs after the hard disk is converted to NTFS. This behavior occurs on Windows XP-based computers that have Simple File Sharing turned on that were upgraded from Windows 98, Windows 98 Second Edition, or Windows Millennium Edition. This behavior occurs because the default permissions of a hard disk that is converted to NTFS do not contain the Everyone group. The Everyone group is required for remote users who are using the Guest account to access the files To reset the permissions, unshare and reshare the affected folders.

Well, they could've made the error message more informative, ain't it so?

Then, I couldn't access anything on the XP Home machine, which is my father's laptop. It seems the Guest account is required to be on (from KB 308007, see "Troubleshooting file and printer sharing"):

Note: All network access to either a Windows XP Home Edition-based computer in a workgroup or to a Windows XP Professional-based computer in a workgroup uses the Guest account. Before you continue troubleshooting, make sure that the Guest account is set up for network access.

This can be checked with 'net user guest', as the article goes on to explain. I seem to have needed to turn on the guest account on the XP home machine in the Users dialog, even though it seems that's not needed (also from KB304040):

If you turn off the Guest account in the User Accounts Control Panel tool, only the guest's ability to log on locally is affected. The account is not disabled.

Hmm, that part I might need to go over again, since 'net user guest' was showing the account to be enabled. Hm.

Anyway, now everything seems to work, thank God.