I recently installed a new media server with attached printer to share across the network. My normal PC running XP pro worked fine, saving the network details and connecting without problems each time after a reboot.
I then found that one of the machines on the network running Windows XP Home was unable to save the network password and therefore unable to display the network shares without entering the password every time the machine was rebooted. It also meant that the shared network printer would not work at all on the XP Home machine as it was expecting a password to be entered - it was possible to use it if a network share was activated before attempting to print. It appears that this "feature" is part of XP Home and there is no facility for saving network passwords in this version of XP.
I have now resolved the problem by swapping the PC for one running XP Professional and all is now working without any issues.
