This will probably help a bunch of people out too: Obviously, Microsoft made changes to the shared networking stuff in Windows Vista. For example, in our case a printer has been set to shared on a Windows XP computer but the regular (or rather, usual way) of detecting this shared printer on Vista always ended up giving the dreaded ‘Access denied’ message (the usual way is to install such a printer as a network printer). The funny thing is that Windows Vista does detect the ‘shared folders’ as such (after going through all the hoops of verifying and changing the settings for the ‘workgroups’ [hey, that’s a WfW 3.11 leftover thing] and firewalls on both PCs).
So, to get to the gist, go to Control Panel | Printers, Add a new printer. Use Local Printer instead. Then, create a new port (leave default of Local Port), enter the complete URI to your shared printer (\\computername\printername) and you should be all set.