Strange, only SOME folders can't be browsed over network

[10Mbps]

I'm gona make it very simple for you.
I have a Desktop and a Laptop. Both installed XP Pro and both shared C:
drive. The Laptop can browse ALL folders and files of the Desktop. But the
Desktop can only browse SOME folders of Laptop, the "Program Files" and
"Windows" folder can't be browsed, it says "access denied".

I have tried to turn on Guest account and Remote Desktop on the Laptop, but
still can't solve. It has taken me a day already trying to solve this
problem.

Please give me a step-by-step instruction to solve, please help!

 

[prosaic]

I hope you won't think I'm just trying to give you a hard time. What you're trying to do is a really bad idea under almost all conceivable circumstances, at least if either or both of those machines has access to the Internet. May I suggest that you consider the security issues involved in doing this, and doing some research on the way file sharing and permissions work in this operating system. I think that almost anyone with experience in this will tell you that, if you have to ask how to do this, then you shouldn't be doing it. This is especially true if these machines are used for anything other than, perhaps, gaming. Beware that, even if you aren't risking personal data, you are definitely risking having these machines subverted and used for purposes other than your own if you do this. By default you would only share the contents of the documents folder structures under the All Users profile, and some people choose to share My Documents (or subfolders thereof) in their own profiles.

You might consider telling us why you are trying to do this to see if whatever it is that you're trying to accomplish can be done in some safer manner. Normally there is just no reason to share the root of a system drive (or the Program Files or Windows directory structures) visibly over a peer-to-peer network. (Admin shares are a different matter, and are used for remote administration on a domain or for use of Remote Desktop / Terminal Services on NT-style machines.)

At any rate, people who try to help you do this are going to need to know if both system drives are formatted using NTFS, if Simple File Sharing is enabled or disabled on each of them, whether or not you have identical user names / passwords on the two systems, whether or not you used the Group Policy Editor to apply any non-default security policies to the two systems. You should note that you do NOT have to turn the Guest account ON in Windows XP in order to use it remotely. Turning Guest account on in Windows XP makes the Guest account available for local logon, assuming that such a logon hasn't been prohibited by a security policy.

Good luck.

- prosaic