Hi,

I need to map a distant drive as a drive letter visible from my XP machine, so I can copy and create files to and from that distant drive without the bother and delay of FTP. Can I do this, knowing the IP address of that distant machine?

It may be that it's part of the VPN or VNC abilities? If only the clever software PEOPLE who named these acronyms weren't so clever and hadn't thought of nearly identical names for very different functions.

many thanks, anyone!If you are using a VPN connection, you will have to connect first then:

You can map the remote drive by "right click on My computer, and select "map network drive". Then either browse to find the drive or enter the info in the FORMAT:
\\server\sharename
or
\\192.168.10.10\sharename

You can also enter these commands from a CMD prompt

net use * \\192.168.10.10\sharename

Your connection speed will not be any different the an ftp connectionIf for some reason the system doesn't allow you to map a drive to it you can use the very neat trick located here http://www.astahost.com/info.php/map-ftp-server-as-drive_t7292.html to map an FTP server as a network drive.