Not able to view contents of folder in home network using Windows 2000

I have a laptop that runs Windows 2000 on my home network. I was not able to view the contents of my XP computer's shared folders from this computer even though I had the same credentials, ie Login and Password, on both computers. I have not had this problem on my Vista computer, which can view and edit files on the shared XP drive. I tried running the network setup wizard on the Windows 2000 computer to make sure all the network settings were correct, but you cannot run the network setup program on Windows 2000. I spent (too much) time researching this, and discovered that I had to enable the Guest Account on the Windows 2000 computer, and then add the Guest User account with full permission to the shared folder on the Windows XP computer. Don't know yet if this is particular to Windows 2000, but I didn't have the same problems with Vista or XP.