you're welcome. glad to have been able to fix it for ya.

That worked! Thanks Nova5, it was as simple as unifiying my username/passwords between the two machines and voila! I would never have guessed it would be that easy- I would have thought that Windows network would see the identical username/password as just a coincidence (in the name of security)- learned something new. (My XP Home machine does have some help topics on setting "permissions" and groups, but that level of control was not there when I tried to find it.) Either way, I just shared the folder with right-click-share function while logged in on the source PC, set read/write priveleges, aligned my user login on my laptop and just like that, problem solved. Thanks again!

What happens is that the host system asks for a username/password when you reach across the network to it. The first thing that the remote windows pc does is reply with the active username/password. the host will respond 1 of 2 ways. Access Granted, and allows the remote to view the folder, or Access Denied, Provide Authorized Account. the remote system in that instance then prompts the user for a user/pass with access to that folder.

Its in XP home yes, its a function of NT's network security and is part of NT based windows OS's (XP is a NT base, as is Vista and any following OS.)

XP home doesn't have the full functional control that Pro(which i use) does for security permissions, but it has enough to accomplish the sharing of the folders as you want. You'd set it to allow write access to the remote users.

Interesting Nova5. So let me get this straight; creating an identical username/password account on any other PC in the workgroup extends privileges of that same-named user account from the host PC? So MS networking rules "understand" that user accounts with identical usernames and passwords are the same user, regardless of which PC on the network they are logged into? Would it matter that my host PC is XP Home?

NTFS permissions can be a real PITA.

When sharing a folder on the network, the MOST RESTRICTIVE permission that is set on that share is used that affects that user, but when accessed at the local station the LEAST Restrictive is used.

So, make sure your laptops are using the same account names and passwords that match the ones that exist on the host pc. otherwise the regular User Group permissions are used, which is Read Only.

For my use i did it a little differently, I create a special user account/password "MusicMan" for the "Music" share, its the only user with access to the Network Share of the folder, so the permissions prompted me for a User with access. Gave it the User/Pass I created and selected the "Remember" box. I did this to streamline access to the music. Since i didnt know what account would be logged in on the remote system, this lets me always have a single account that can be used to access the music, don't need to go back to the host system to add a new account!

Thanks Teknojnky, I figured it was a Windows thing and not a MM thing, I just hoped someone else had been-there-done-that and had a relatively painless work around. I have googled it and most of what I've found seems to be either beyond the capabilities of one of my OS's (XP Home) or beyond my compfort level to implement. I'm passionate about music and absolutely love MM, but I'm not passionate about network administration, so I'll probably just copy my entire library onto my laptop, run independently and move on with life...(at least for now!)

mm has no such restrictions, sounds like windows permissions problems. its probly better to google/research that to get the permissions fixed.

keep in mind that there are 2 different types of permissions (share and ntfs) and both need to be set correctly along with your user/passwords accounts on all machines.

how you go about setting all that depends entirely what OS's your using and is really beyond the scope of this forum (windows networking).

I've been using MM for a year or so on a single home PC. Now both my wife and I have new laptops so I am trying to set up a centralized location for music files and database. I've added, mapped and shared a high-capacity drive to the original PC and moved all of the music files to it. I've moved the DB to this new drive and changed the ini files to find this new location. Everything seems to work fine but... I can't write to tags or add to the library from the laptops, only on the original PC. Seems I can only overcome this if I manually share each and every folder and subfolder on the mapped drive, which is unrealistic for my collection. Is this just the reality of MS file sharing limitations or does someone have a workaround?

It's really important to me that all changes get written to both the database and the song tags and that seems to be the sticking point. Any suggestions? Would this be different if I just installed a standalone network drive not attached to a PC?