Win XP - Win 7 - Vista - guests

Ever since I upgraded to Win7 64 bit with my gamer I have been studying Win 7 networking. I did not read soon enough and tried to set up Win 7 home networking. Bad idea. My server is XP as are most of the computers in the house.
I finally got things to work by giving up entirely on the GUI in Win 7, running static IP's from the router and mapping drives. Unfortunately this does not work very quickly for visitors which makes me sneakernet a portable hard drive to give them the custom game maps we play while I configure an IP for them.
There are tons of threads all over the net trying to address this issue.
Any chance MG can compile the best advice and sticky it?