Gary Burton's dashboard

Thanks Nick, but I am still fighting this. In fact, it's driving me nuts. Please take a fresh look at some more facts, and maybe you can help:
I followed all of your advice, and it didn't help.
I have a wireless LAN between my laptop and my desktop. Both machines show a good connection to the network. It must be good because I can see any files marked as shared on the laptop from the desktop. However the reverse is not true. I can't see anything from my laptop that is marked as shared on my desktop.
I can easily connect to the internet on both machines.
My network printer works with from either machine. For my laptop, that connection also goes to my wireless router, so there must be nothing wrong with the setup.
Although my problems started when I uninstalled Zone Alarm and installed SPF, I can now disable SPF on both machines and I still have the same symptoms. The settings you suggested changed the symptoms from what I first described to what I am getting now, but I believe it is the same problem. I am also a new user of Vipre. I can disable active virus protection too, and still have the problem.
When I look at the properties of my wireless network connection on either machine, I see a new item in the list, "Sunbelt Software Firewall NDIS IM Filter". It was checked, so I unchecked it, but nothing changed so I checked it again.
An icon appears on my laptop under My Network Places--Entire Network--Microsoft Windows Network, but when I click on the network name I get a long delay and an error. The error message I get says "Burtons is not accessible...The list of servers for this workgroup is not available."
Another thing is also strange. When I go to my desktop and select the network "Burtons" the laptop doesn't show up as part of the network. As I said I can easily connect to the laptop from the desktop, but I do it through the "Network Places" I set up some time ago with the path "\\laptop\folder". I can't get there by browsing the network.
It behaves as though none of the files on my desktop are not selected for sharing, but some of them are. I unshared one folder, then shared it again just to see if the sharing was corrupted, but that didn't help either.
Sorry this is so long, but I really need your help. I'm out of ideas!