Cannot connect to my printer

Going round in circles here so hoping someone can stop my cycle of madness and bring a fresh pair of eyes to my problem.

I have a desktop PC with a USB connected printer, the PC connects to a Netgear Router. I also have a laptop which is connected to the internet via the router. Both machines are running XP.

I'm trying to set up the laptop so I can print, I've set the printer to 'Share this Printer' and I can see it in the Workgroup folder on my Desktop PC but for some reason I cannot access the Workgroup folder via my laptop and the 'Add Printer' wizard on the laptop can't find my printer.

I'm sure I'm missing something really obvious here but I can't see where I need to go to allow permission for the laptop to access the network, I have access to the internet (using the laptop to send this) and I can see the Workgroup folder on the laptop but when I try to open it I'm told I have no permission and I should contact my administrator (despite talking to myself for some time that hasn't helped)

Can anyone tell me what I'm missing please?

 

xp's sharing is rough...have you rebooted both computers?
do you have any firewalls on either computer?
is sharing turned on for both?

 

Laptop has been rebooted but not PC (yet) both are running Zone Alarm, PC has full package but laptop just has free firewall, as far as I can tell I have both switched on for sharing.

I ticked share in the printer properties on the PC, I even tried connecting via an IP address but I suspect I got that wrong as it failed to connect.

 

i would reboot the pc. are you using the \\ in front of the ip? just checking, should look something like this
\\192.168.1.1
or whatever the ip is.

 

Many Thanks for your help, turned out that a couple of days away from the problem, a fresh look & a tweak of the F/wall settings sorted the problem out.

Suspect I was burying myself too deep into it to see the obvious.