Why is it so difficult to read posts in this group? One person follows
proper protocol and bottom posts and the next ignores protocol and top posts
and it so hard to read this group.

Anyhow, it not really accurate to say that you cannot see your host's disks
or access them when using a virtual machine. I do all the time. I move
between three VMWare Workstation virtual guests and Virtual PC Vista guest
and I can see my host files and access them all the time. The only time you
cannot is if you go full screen with the guest. That is very difficult to do
in Virtual PC. Very buggy feature. Easy to do in VMWare. But if you don't go
full screen (almost full screen but you still see the host's taskbar and
systray and start menu) then you can easily access anything on the host
while moving around among many virtual guests. Virtual PC seems especially
easy to access the host. I don't think Virtual PC is as secure as VMWare's
Workstation machines as they are more discreet seems to me.

You do not "only" access things on the host machine via shared files or
networking. You just grab what you want and drop it on the virtual machine.
That works on XP ...not as well on Vista unless you place the file you want
from XP (assuming that is your host OS) in a root folder. Then you can just
grab it when you have the guest in almost full screen but not completely
full screen.

You are looking at the wrong Action menu.  You are looking at the VPC
Console.  You need to look at the Action menu on the virtual machine's
console (the window in which the guest is running).

As Colin mentioned, the key here is to remember that a virtual machine is no
different from a physical machine as far as the software installed on it is
concerned.

Therefore, you network a physical host and a virtual guest in exactly the
same way as you would network any other two machines...