Look at this screen capture that was taken in Windows XP Home:
Notice anything extremely alarming?
It seems Simple File Sharing (read sharing for morons) is a really dumbed down version of sharing available in previous versions of Windows. It is the only method available in XP Home. XP Pro allows one to turn the Simple File Sharing off which allows finer security controls over sharing and access to files.
Even with the Guest account disabled anyone can connect to shares on XP Home. It seems not to matter what security one actually has set on the files either.
Be very weary about setting up any shares in XP Home.
Most of the popular security websites I found seem to think that anonymous file share access is disallowed if one disables the Guest account. This is simply not true. As you can see by the screen capture above, the user hacker (which doesn't exist as a user on this particular XP install) shows as a Guest user. Furthermore had full access to files.
Any better reason to upgrade to WinXP Pro??
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