Win7 Networking - best and worst of times?

I bought two copies of Win7 Pro. Wifey got 32 bit, I installed 64 bit. We set up a Homegroup and sharing was automatic. The best of times!
Then came sharing our kids computers and the server, all running XP and Wifey's Mac. The worst of times.
The Mac set up perfectly all by itself and showed 4 shares from each Win7 machine, all accessible with logon pass. I thought I shared one per machine, but Win7 auto-shares more.
After much reading I gave up on Homegroup for sharing with XP. Back to a Workgroup for us. I set up as per advice from the Win7 forum, did not work, then Black Viper forum, then DigitalLife. DigitalLife settings seemed to work best as I can map drives although the Network map shows each Win7 machine standing alone. The worst suggestion may be the only workable one, change them all to Win7. However, this means when guests come over with their XP machines I will fail.

Anyone else think Win7 networking in a mixed environment is out of control?

 

homegroup is great, only if all machines are running windows 7.
I still use windows networking, as quirky as it is, with my xp machine. It works fine, but i've found that it's better to assign static ip addresses from the router, and when looking for shared folders on the network, or assigning network drives, I use the ip address rather than using the computer name, or searching for it in Network Places. Unfortunately setting up read-only rules and the like tend to make things flakey with xp and 7.
I also like to use remote desktop and i've found that most of the time i have to manually type in the ip of the machine, because it doesn't come up when i click browse on the network, but it will (almost) always work when i use the ip.

 

Thanks, the XP machine does not have the patch, will install.
Then follow the Guide, but I think previous advice may have made a reinstall of Win7 necessary.

Static IP address from the router? Not following, only done that from the Windows side.

 

on some routers, you can set the ip by mac address. only one i've seen is netgear, and the ddwrt linksys alternative firmware. It's alot easier to manage than from windows. I'm sure there are others, but those are the only ones I know of.

 

I cannot believe how easy that was and that it worked.

I put the U-Verse 2-Wire router IP into Chrome (192.168.1.254) and ran through the configs. There is a place to set up connected computers as "static" IP's. I use the quotes as the computers themselves stay with DHCP but the router hands them the same IP address every time. The password is a string of numbers printed on the router.

All the computers show up and share properly, Mac, XP, Windows7.

Note that the computers had to be up and running and there was a mystery allocation that turned out to be a phone adapter. The computers were listed by name so I made a list, assigned IP's, saved the router settings and rebooted all the computers. Now they can be turned off, hibernate or sleep with no problems.