I have two Compacs running XP, three Macs running OS10.4.8, a SNAP server running some old version of SNAP OS, and a XIMETA NDAS server. I have installed Vista on a second clean drive of one of the Compacs and that went well. I finally got my network HP printer to be recognized and installed after downloading the Latest XP versions of the server driver and the printer driver. (Nothing comes on the Vista package as with the XP CD).

The problem is having anything resembling control of what the Vista machine sees on the network. For example, under Mac OS, one lists the IP addresses of Macs as
afp://<IP address> and Windows machines as smb://<IP address> and then one has virtually iron clad control of being able to see shared files on all those machine if they are turned on. As best I can tell, there is no equivalent thing under Windows. However, I can with irregularity see my Macs and PCs by clicking on the Network Icon on the desktop or the Network Icon in Control Panels. While I can see the SNAP server from XP reliably, I cannot get Vista to generate the right logon and password. I think the problem is that Vista puts a prefix on all logons which is the name of the Vista computer. I think the SNAP server does not like that. (The Macs and other PC will tolerate it). I have searched everywhere to figure out how to stop Vista from putting this prefix on the logon. It appears this is a security feature and might be removed if one could create a "Roaming" logon. However, that option is always "grayed out."

1.Does anyone have a clue about how to get reliable control of network computer and server accessibility?

2.Is there a way to get Vista to show all passwords being used for any purpose in the machine?

3.Is there a way to get Vista to show all logons from Vista as seen by the network?

4. Is there a way to get iron clad editing control of any of this stuff?

Thanks,

Ray Zachary