Windows Firewall / ICS

I have have 2 PCs that I want to connect together and share a connection on a cable modem. I have done this already when they were both using Windows 98se. But after one of the hard drives died I decided to put XP Pro on one of them.

I now have a strange problem. I cannot run the network wizard because I get an error about ICS. I Using the XP pro setup disk does get me any further. And (I don't know if it is related), when I clicked on help and support and entered my keyword to search by it return no results at all. In fact no keywords work at all, and the whole help database appears to be completely empty.

I have tried to set up the network and sharing manually but it does not work.
I can see the 98se machine from the XP machine, and even browse through the shared directories. From the 98se machine I can see the XP machine but I cannot access anything.

How can I rectify this problem? It says on the setup disk that it is SP 2. Does that mean that it should all be there and correct or do I need to install SP 2 from another disk (I do have a disk that says something about SP 2 on it)?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

I moved this from XP to networking.

XP handles networking security very differently than 98 does so you will have to do a couple of things to allow 98 to get access to files/folders/printers on XP.

If you don't have any security concerns for your home network and are willing to have the two PCs freely get access to each other then
- XP : make sure Simple File Sharing is checked (see the 1st picture). It probably is.
- XP : make sure the guest account is enabled. By default it is disabled on XP-pro. (2nd picture).
- 98 : require log on with a username and non-blank password. Easiest way to do that is to locate any file(s) with a .pwl ending and rename to .pwl-old to deactivate them. At next boot you should get a logon screen with a space for username and password. Put something in each.

Try the above and lets get it working before moving on to the ICS issues. Post back with your results and we'll go from there.

Note that if you want more internal security (between the two PCs) you can certainly have it but the setup will need to be a little different.