sailer :
Welcome to Vista and its annoyances. Vista is filled to the brim with things that are designed to protect you from yourself. You probably need to move anything that you want to share into the public folder. Otherwise, Vista will think that that its something not to be shared and it will surround that thing with all kinds of safeguards. Someone else may know how to share folders, but so far, the only way I have found is to put stuff I want to share into the public folder.
Vista requires the right setup in the Network and Sharing Centre,
the right firewall config (windows or 3rd party), network permissions and NTFS permissions - this stuff has been around since NT, surely someone has figured how to use them by now
Been running a windows vista file server for months now (Vista Ultimate, just sharing files, virus scanner to look after it all, just for temporary storage) - XP would cut out on the same setup, got sick of it so tried vista and perfect since, not to mention to install on a Intel Matrix Raid setup it was so much easier - no stupid disks needed, automatic updated found everything.
Two minutes and everyone could access the thing across two network cards for two Independent bandwidths - couldn't be easier, dont blame an OS because YOU dont know how to use it.