I just found something interesting. I brought up my XP guest, and it had no trouble at all connecting to the shares, but it couldn't open the workgroup at all and the printer had become disconnected. I could not reconnect through the workgroup (duh), but if I just input the network name, the printer came up just fine. So: I can connect to my shares from the XP guest, and I can connect to my printer from the XP guest, I just can't open the workgroup (this is relatively new, like, since I began messing with the smb.conf file in the last two weeks). Don't know exactly what that means, but I haven't given up yet. Tomorrow I'll dig in more on the remote machine and see where that all takes me. Any helpful suggestions still welcome.... :-) mhr