[softley7]

Thank you very much for this reply. I would never have guessed this solution in a month of Sundays. It enabled me to connect my two XP machines in one direction so that from one I could transfer to the other all the files I needed to back everything up. I might do a clean reinstall of XP now on the machine that refuses to receive files. It is a few years old and probably will benefit from the 'deep clean'. Hopefully it will simply connect then