Vista/XP Printer sharing>Access Denied-solved

[Not Me]

I had a friend call for assistance in connecting their new Vista equipped
laptop to their printer.
I set up their network a couple years ago, and have added new machines and
an XBox 360 to the wireless.
The printer is attached to a desktop machine running XP Home and is
shared/used by 3 other XP machines on the LAN (a mix of wired and wireless
on a Linksys wireless router >Cable modem).
All the XP machines print to it fine.
The Vista machine finds the printer from the add printer wizard, but when I
click it to select and click NEXT, I get 'could not connect, access denied'.
I removed the factory installed Norton Security Suite from the new (Compaq)
laptop (and installed AVG AV & Spybot search & destroy), made sure print
sharing is allowed in Windows firewall on both systems, and rebooted both
systems.
The 'can not connect' error remained.
I then created a shared folder on the XP machine.
Viola, the printer now allows connection with Vista.
I find it strange that the other XP machines will share the printer without
having a folder shared, but Vista won't connect.
Problem solved, but yet another GRRRRR at Vista.

[LAB Enterprises]

It seems that vista has problems loading the print drivers correctly over a
network. What I've done that works is to connect the printer directly to the
Vista machine, install it as a printer, do a test page and make sure it's
printing. Then I reconnect the printer to the network and go thru "add a
printer" thru the network on the vista machine.

This has worked twice for me now and I can now print from my vista laptop to
either printer on my desktop. BTW, my XP Home desktop already had a shared
folder, so this wasn’t the problem for me.