Nsda! Finally restored win 7 back to Jrestore point and Voila! Things worked again - for a couple days until MS sent 4 critical updates. Tried everthing including removing McAffee firwall. (Throughout this period all machines were protected by McAffee suite.) At which point win 7 quit working with the other machines, no see even though had drives mapped and printers shared. I had my win 7 wireless laptop seeing and sharing nicely with my 3 xp machines on my home network from November 2009 'til around June 16,2010. If you are using a wireless connection you may have changed the ID or keyword when you installed the Win 7 computer. If your broadband modem is connected to the router and the router is connected to each computer your should not have any problems. The XP computer's internet problem is not related the above. Before you can network the computers, you must assign the same workgroup name to both of them and SHARE folders in Explorer. In the next window choose 'Work network' that will switch you from a homegroup to a workgroup so your two computers can talk to each other. Click the link under 'view your active networks' (if you've set up a Homegroup,the link should say 'home network').

On your Windows 7 computer, click the Start button at the bottom left of the screen, then go to the Control Panel and choose Network and Sharing Center. If so, you will need to change the networking system to one that XP can use. Homegroup only works with Windows 7 computers and will not talk to your XP computer. Did you set up Homegroup for networking in Windows 7?

Homegroup not detected windows 10