my network is as so, a p3, a dual lan athlon and an xbox

the xbox and the athlon or p3 ftp anyway so its forceable, but when i use the p3 in explorer to access the athlon i can only rech basic destinations such as the cd drives and C and floppy drive and i can use the i-net on my athlon from the p3...

however once i try to access oh, say program files or my documents its like 'access denied, you may not have sufficient rights to access this folder'... it even does this when i hook up my laptop to it, but i have not set any certain restrictions to access...

can sum1 plz help me in a bit of detail?

You haven't properly set share rights and permissions. There are many guides on the internet, probably even a guide on MS's site, on how to go about doing this. Windows defaults to not allowing other users access to files across a network. That's why you get the error.

right click on the folder you wish to share and click sharing. then select share on network and type a name for the share

If your using a NT based version of windows <4,xp,2k>, and you installed the os with the partition as NTFS, windows at the last leg of the install sets up default file permissions on some of the directories. This is diffrent from share permision, since you can have access to the share and not have access at the file system level. <In other words a big pain in the arce>
Check the permissions on the particular folders for that user account that you are trying to log in as.