I had heaps of trouble getting my Vista laptop to play nice on the home wireless network. After a while I thought I had it sussed. Printer sharing was the biggest problem but changing the network card in the XP machine that had the printers attached seemed to work for all machines but the Vista one. It seems that one has to manually create a local port in Vista and point it to the shared printer. How intuitive :-(
Once I got the printers working I found that I could not do any file sharing to or from the vista machine. The XP machines worked fine but I could get nothing to or from the Vista laptop. The network would time-out when copying a file and, more strangely, if I hit the back button in explorer the connection would time-out just returning to the previous folder view!
After much head-scratching (I can tear out any more hair 'cause there's not that much left) I found an oblique reference to encryption standards somehwere on the 'net and that got me thinking. I was using WPA over 802.11g with a very long pass-phrase. I changed back to WEP and file sharing was O.K.
Now I couldn't leave the network vulnerable by using WEP so I looked into the WPA-Personal settings on each of the machines. It seems that I originally chose TKIP as the encryption type when I upgraded the network from 802.11b to the 802.11g cards and added a wireless router. I can't remember whay I chose TKIP for the encryption type but just on a hunch I changed them all to AES and voila my Vista file sharing problems went away!
I don't know why this fixed the issues and I have not had either the time nor inclination to find out. Just posting it all here so I don't forget ans so that others may find my experience useful.
Cheers,
Neale