Workgroups And Domains

I have done this using a method on an NT 4.0 SP6a Server network. I had a user with a laptop running XP Home that needed to access his folders on the server. XP Home will not longin to a domain, but it can access shares on the PDC. I set up a seperate user account on the PDC and assiged his permissions for the shares he needed to access with this laptop account. The user could login from his workstation using the domain account and still access the server from the laptop using a peer-to-peer connection. All of the workstations run Win98 and could connect to each other peer-to-peer, so he also had access these shares ( printers ). I mapped his laptop to the shares on the server using \\\. He supplied his laptop account username\password when he connected to the shares from his laptop and all worked fine. I have done several laptops the same way that are using XP Home. No problems after 12 months.
Your situation is different, but would work the same way. Set up user accounts and appropriate shares on the server and assign permissions. Map the workstations to their appropriate shares and they will only need to supply the correct username/password to access these shares. Of course, the cleanest and easiest way is to have the workstations join the domain. Should the XP machine be XP Home, you can still access the server shares using the method I did. It worked flawlessly for me.

I hope this helps you.