Print

[Bomb Bloke]

By default, Vista has "password protected sharing" enabled (check the Network and Sharing Center panel). With this on, Windows will always request login details EVEN IF all the accounts with access to the share do not actually have passwords on them.

Creating an account for the X-Box is a way around this, but unless that account specifically has access to the shares it won't work. Right click your share, hit Properties, and check both the Security and the Sharing tabs list the relevant account as having access.

Note that there's an "Everyone" group you can grant access to. I personally grant this group access to my shares, disable password protected sharing, and that's that: No login prompts, it just works (until Windows starts assigning random permissions to the contents of my shared folders, but that's easily fixed by just re-assigning them myself).

Network Discovery (located in the NaSC panel) also needs to be on for sharing to work (or you'll get "server not found" messages).

[Bomb Bloke]

Setting your network to private makes Vista turn the firewall off (it figures there must already be one between it and the internet and so disables it without asking you). I have no idea why but for some reason I can't get shares to work when this happens. I have to re-enable it (which will likely turn off Network Discovery again), re-enable Discovery, then re-enable the firewall again... And then it works.

But your issue seems to indicate that particular quirk isn't affecting you (the console is able to contact the PC, the PC just wants a login).

Vista uses a slightly different version of SMB to XP, when it first came out XBMC was (of course) incompatible with it. It didn't take long for it to be updated, of course - but what build of XBMC are you running?

[Bomb Bloke]

Google T3CH's site, and grab an updated version.

Note that you can't replace the version on your console while you are actively running it. You can, on the other hand, install the fresh copy to a different location on your console's drive, run it from there, then use that to clean off then replace the old one.

[IvanW]

I loaded XBMC version 8.10 (Atlantis) and everything now works perfectly, without any other changes.

Early versions of XBMC simply do not work on Vista SP1 no matter what you do.