I have Norton Internet Security 2011 installed on two Windows 7 SP1 laptops. The laptops could not see each other on my home network. In the Network and Sharing Center->Change Advanced Sharing Settings I set the following.
Network Discovery: ON
File and Printer Sharing: ON
Public Folder Sharing: ON
Media Steaming: ON
File Sharing Connections: 128-bit encryption
Password protected sharing: ON
I then shared each hard drive on both laptops. The computers could see each other on the network but no hard drives. Next I followed the instructions in the Microsoft article "Networking home computers running different versions of Windows." which said to open several ports. I created a firewall rule that opened these ports: UDP 3702, 5355, 137, 138, 1900, TCP 5357, 5358, 139, 445, 2869, 5357, 5358.
One computer could see the hard drives on the other and I could see and open all the files. However the other computer's hard drive was inaccessible. The shared drive appeared in Network but when I double-clicked on it I saw this error message:
"Windows cannot access \\computer_name\C-Share. You do not have permission to access \\computer_name\C-Share. Contact your network administrator to request access."
Any suggestions on how to get file and printer sharing working? I'm not sure how to configure the firewall to support this.
Thanks!