Haven't had a problem with 7 and Vista.

To clarify - I haven't had any issues running a mixture of XP, Vista and 7 on the same network and if anything I find Win 7 accesses network shares rather faster than my XP boxes. I have certainly had fewer headaches with a mixed network than I ever had with XP only and simple sharing.

If you want to share with everybody on a network you don't need to use password protected account access in Windows 7 (or Vista) instead of specifying individual users just specify "Everybody" as the user and then is gives open access to all computers on the LAN to that folder.

As discussed  in a previous DC thread, it might be a good idea to designate one PC in the LAN as the 'Master Browser' and disable this functionality on all other (Windows) PC's in the LAN.

In each Windows version (2000, XP, 2003) the default setting for 'Master Browser' is enabled. When combining such PC's in a LAN each one continuously tries to become the 'Master Browser' introducing long waiting times for initial connections. My network only has one Master Browser and I cannot tell the difference between a network drive/share/UNC and a local drive when accessing folders. Directories and files show up instantly.

Now I suspect that the networking client from Win7 is setup the same way with regards to the 'Master Browser' setting, I could be wrong as I don't have Win7 to test it myself.

No - MS seems to treat Workgroups as extremely simple domain type systems in practice (hence the reference to domain MSHOME in the last article which is actually the default workgroup name in XP).

Backup the settings and give that method a try and let us know if it makes any difference.

Backup the settings and give that method a try and let us know if it makes any difference.

It's now down to around 15-25 seconds but added the need to enter a username/password to connect, (even for an Everyone share) - so it got removed, (the last thing I want on LAN night is to be bombarded with: "I can't access that directory!" or "What's the user/password?", when I'm busy trying to get that last enemy in OFDR or CoD-MW2.

It's also not just on initial share listing, if I go into a shared folder and then return to the parent, (\\computername), it'll take the same amount of time to list all the shares again - I thought it would have cached them?

EDIT: Just as a matter of interest, could someone using DOpus on Win7 tell me if the "Share with" context menu works?
Here it works under Explorer but not DOpus but as yet I haven't looked into possible causes.

Just turn off password protected sharing.

It was turned off on both Public and Home or Work, (and still is).  Maybe I'll have to do a Install in Place, (can you still do that with Win7), and start from near scratch.

On another note:

Win7's Power Options->Balanced settings, I've changed the Sleep time to 1 hour, (30 minutes is just too short), and it goes into Sleep after 60 minutes of me doing nothing on the mouse/keyboard......but the majority of the time it does it regardless of what the PC is doing.

ie. I'll start a number of video encodes to be done overnight, CPU load is always 50-90% doing these.  Next morning I'll boot up the PC from Sleep to find it start to continue doing the encodes.

I always thought that Windows only went into Sleep mode when there was minimal CPU activity, (eg. 0-10%) ?

I always thought that Windows only went into Sleep mode when there was minimal CPU activity, (eg. 0-10%) ?

Nope, depends on user input activity (keyboard/mouse, like Carol mentioned). It's possible to programmatically disable this, though, rather than sending mouse input events. Most media players do this to avoid sending the OS to sleep while watching a DVD