I am on a campus dorms network consisting of 200+ randomly allocated machines from all parts of the world. On this network I have set up (behind my router) some file sharing on my primary XP Sp3 machine for my many campus photos to share with by friends! Due to people grabbing my files without my permission, I decided to create a user account (let's call it user1) with a password and make the shares only accessible to my account and this user1. The problem then comes in where when other XP machines attempt to connect to it with \\myip\photos for instance... Instead of prompting the user for a username and password (like it typically would, I presume), it quickly dismisses them with an "access denied" error. However, on my Linux machines with samba, I can easily connect because they either prompt me for a password (smbmount, etc) or I can use in a file manager with smb://user1assword@myip/photos
I have attempted this on both sides of my network router with the same results so that is not a problem. I come from a more Linux environment but as a technician I am forced to know XP. However this question along with my previous windows experiences defy what I know! As the case may be, there are a substantial amount of different workgroups on the network and I suspect this could be a problem but why it would be so behind a NAT router bothers me. However, this same problem occurred before I added the router.

Please excuse any typing mistakes. I am writing this on my phone.
Thank you so much in advance!