Windows 7 and Airport Extreme disk do not connect

Question

I have three windows computers (XP, VISTA & 7) and one mac mini all sharing a drive connected to my airport extreme. I can access the drive fine with computers except windows 7.
My configuration on the airport was to prompt for a disk password, so I changed it to ask for username and password and I still cannot connect.
I have tried to map it via \\10.0.1.1\Disk and also \\extreme\Disk neither work.
I have been able to connect or at least it appears to connect by showing me the drive listed in windows 7, but none of the files are present. Windows xp and vista show the files fine and still can connect.

Answer 1

But currently have it working with the Win 7 defaults of:
1) "Send NTLMv2 response only" for "Network security: LAN Manager authentication level"
2) "Require 128-bit encryption" for "Network security: Minimum session security for NTLM SSP based (including RPC) clients"
also, my "Windows Search" is enabled.
I might end up revisiting these ideas though, because if I disconnect the network drive from the PC and then try to remap it, I run into some of the same problems that occurred in the initial troubleshooting - in other words I cannot just map the drive, need to reboot.
So the problem that I had in summary:
- I had gotten the Airport Extreme shared USB drive to connect to the PC by first a reboot and then connecting via wireless to the Airport Extreme
- If I disconnected from the shared drive on the PC, then I could not re-map it (I could get it back by the reboot / connect mentioned above): Windows was asking for "user name" and "password" when I went through the "Map network drive", following the ideas specified in "AirPort: How to mount an AirPort Extreme USB hard disk volume in Mac OS X and Windows" (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1331?viewlocale=en_US)
After more monkeying and searching around, I found that could fix this by:
1) On the PC, go to Start, type "advanced share" in the search box. This will take you to "Change sharing options for different network profiles" (can also get there by going to Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Network and Sharing Center\Advanced sharing settings).
2) Once there, go down to the bottom "Password protected sharing" and click "Turn off password protected sharing". Save your changes.
3) Disconnect / reconnect to your Airport Extreme - I am doing it via the primary (non-guest) wireless.
Then, whenever I connect to the primary (non-guest) wireless on Airport Extreme, the share automatically maps itself. I can disconnect from it (the share) and it will disappear from under My Computer. To reconnect to it (the share), I just recycle the wireless connection. And, if I log on to the guest network, the share is not visible, which is how I would expect it to perform with my settings.
In Control Panel Microsoft describes "Password protected sharing" as:
When password protected sharing is on, only people who have a user account and password on this computer can access shared files, printers attached to this computer, and the Public Folders. To give other people access, you must turn off password protected sharing.
Maybe I am just tired from pounding away at this (yes, still using the "Monkey Theory" analogy - it is actually listed as the "Infinite monkey theorem" on Wikipedia if you want to read about it) but the whole thing still doesn't make much sense to me.
As far as why changing Network security policies may work for some and not others is a bit of a mystery. I did pursue this further and ran Wireshark while I changed these settings around. There were some differences in the "Negotiate Protocol Request" and "Negotiate Protocol Response" sequence, as would be expected but the end result for me was just keeping the default Win 7 values and making the changes mentioned above to get things working.
Otherwise, in Wireshark, I could just continually see as the PC got rejected for an attempt to logon to the share with its credentials, which I could not effectively change via the "Map network drive".
I also just ended up Turning off network discovery from the control panel (same location as mentioned above). Now, if I try to browse in the "Map network drive" , I get a popup that sates:
"Network discovery is turned off. Network computers and devices are not visible. Please turn on network discovery in Network and Sharing Center."
Yet, there is my nicely mapped Airport Extreme shared drive, sitting under My Computer, fully accessible and listed as a Network Drive. So, I am not sure what is really more baffling, the semantics or the technology that is at work underneath it.
I would love to hear if anyone else can get things working by doing any of the above.
Message was edited by: aprouser