SRS -

WinXP help of course doesn't give much help with respect to what might happen if you delete the old user ident stuff. I'd be reluctant to try that except as a last resort.

I assume that you've tried to access while logged on with Administrator privileges.

I have encountered a similar problem with LAN connections to "her" machine from mine. The "mapped" drive that used to work well just by having her share a folder sort of went bonkers with some security fixes some months ago, and the only thing I've found is to actually log on to her machine as one of the users of that machine. The "fix" was to re-map the drive using a logon valid on her machine.

Your "new machine" should have a "name" that may or may not be the same as your "old machine" name. You may or may not have to use the "machine name" along with the drive/folder name to do the mapping as required.

In Windows Explorer, right click on "My Computer" and one of the options should be "Map Network Drive." You normally do not have to have a network set up to map a drive, or a folder, on your own machine to a different "drive letter." You may be able to just enter an F:\My Documents for the folder to be mapped as a new drive on your machine, or may have to use the "\\MachineName\F:\My Documents" format. There should be an option box to "log on as a different user" and if you check the box, you should get a place to enter a username and password.

IF the F:\ drive is looking at its own info (assumed if it's blocking you) using the old username and password exactly as you would have typed them in under the old setup may let you access the drive as if it's on another machine and you've supplied the logon for a user on that other machine.

NO GUARANTEES here, but it's the only thing I can think of at the moment. You have a "configuration" that apparently Microsoft doesn't think would ever happen(?).

If your updates are in order, WinXP may think it should refuse to let you into the old C:\root, so for this to work you'll probably have to go for subfolders. If you provide the logon info for the user who could access a folder, it shouldn't matter if the folder has been shared. IF it works (??) you'll get a Z:\ drive in Windows Explorer that you can copy stuff from to C:\.

When you're done with one logon, right click on the mapped drive (usually Z:\ if you take the default) and click Disconnect and that connection should disappear so you can proceed to the next user. As an alternative, you can map several drives at the same time (but I'd be prone to forget which was which).

If you can get your data off the F:\ drive, this is probably one case where reformatting F:\ to get a clean start with it as a spare volume probably will be a good idea.

Again, I'm speculating about the likelihood that this will work, but this is the procedure I use to access a drive that KNOWS it's not on my machine, and it could work for a drive that's gone berserk and just THINKS it's in a different world.

John