[Samba] Can XP Home really Samba ?

[Venkata Avasarala]

Hi,
    I know that XP Home edition is supposed to work with Samba.
However,  my experiences over the past 2 weeks have left me with a
real doubt. All I want is a simple share from my Linux box to the XP
Home machine with no password. I have set guest ok = yes, enabled
cleartext password in both Samba and XP. I have a common account in
both XP and Linux and nothing seems to work.

Initially XP client would start using port 80 for communicating with
the server after some kind  folks suggsted in this list, I disabled
the XP webclient service and now atleast XP client tries to use the
netbios port when I do a net use from the XP command shell.
I have the following problems
1)XP Home will not show the Linux server in Network Neighbourhood (if
it is Local Master browser) and shows nothing if it losses election.
2)Since I know the IP address of the Samba server doing a net use with
the IP address like net use b: \\192.168.0.4\Apache results in a
System error 1 on the XP box.
3)I see lot of UDP inquiry messages and responses and I see an
incoming reuest handled by NMB and it response in the log. However, I
do not see any activity in the SMB log.
If XP Home cannot really interoperate with Samba then I will just drop
this and use SFTP :( .
Thanks,
-Venkata.