Networking Windows 7 and XP Machines

This problem has been plaguing me for about 3 hours now. I've done extensive googling on the subject and still haven't found a solution for me. Here's the problem. I'm trying to network my Windows 7 laptop with my older Windows XP laptop. Before I get the same repeat answers I've gotten from everyone else, I'll tell you what I did.

I've made sure that they are in the same workgroup, aka having the same workgroup name. That should be obvious. I have homegroups turned off for Windows 7. I have file and printer sharing enabled for both 7 and XP Machines. I have all the appropriate advanced sharing settings set to what they need to be on Windows 7 (i.e. network discovery turned on, file and printer sharing turned on, etc). I've set up the network a million times on XP.

On first attempts, I tried connecting the computers through my wireless router. Not using cat 5 by way of ethernet, but by wireless connection. The closest I could come was that in Windows 7, my laptop would show up in the network map but I couldn't access the computer itself through the Windows 7 laptop. I got error code 0x80070035. I even researched that and could not find any help. You might think it has something to do with both firewalls being turned on but it's not. I've had both firewalls turned off. So I thought it might be an issue with wireless as opposed to being directly plugged in through cat 5. Also my xp machine couldn't even recognize the windows 7 machine when I did it this way.

Now I've done the cat 5 thing and neither computer will recognize each other. I don't know what else to do. I'm sure I've tried nearly everything. It must be a Windows 7 issue and I can't think of anything else. Any help?

When both machines are on the network, do they both get IP addresses? (Use the IPv4 address if it's labelled as such in Win7, XP can't browse to IPv6 shares.) Have you tried browsing to the IP addresses manually instead of through Explorer (sometimes a machine won't show up but IP works) - you can go to Start > Run > \\IPADDRESS\ > OK, e.g. try opening \\192.168.1.100\ if thats the IP of the other machine.

I was going to attach a document called "Windows 7 and HomeGroup Downlevel Sharing.docx" I downloaded from Microsoft a while back for whenever I get Windows 7 some day and need it, it explains sharing between Windows 7 and other OSs like XP, Linux, and MacOSX, but it seems 3.5 MB compressed is too big to attach :p You could google for the file and download it yourself though :p Or maybe Bing is more appropriate in this case :p