Using Samba with WinXP

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

| I finally decided to set up WinXP at home but am having a devil of a time
| with Samba.  None of the Google searches seems to get me what I want.
|
| Guest shares can be mounted just fine.  Those which require user authentication
| (on my Samba server from a WinXP client) yield the following in log.smbd:

Which reminds me ...  I've tried on several occasions to set up samba
so  my  wife's  Win  machine can use my machine's laser printer.  The
tests between a couple of linux boxen always say it's  working  fine,
but of course I don't want to use samba to connect linux to linux.

The problem is that the Win machine always insists that there are  no
other machines in its Network Neighborhood.  In particular, there are
no shares or printers or anything on the net.  I've looked around  on
several occasions for instructions on how to convince the Win machine
that the samba server exists, but never found anything.  It seems  to
be  off-topic  in  linux  fora,  since the problem isn't on the linux
side, so you get no answers there.  The MS side, of course,  sees  no
point in giving advice to linux geeks.

So is there somewhere a HOWTO that explains how to get a Win  box  to
acknowledge  the  existence of non-Win machines?  Some people seem to
have made it work, so there must be some way to learn about it.