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I have been told from D-Link that a fire wall is not needed the router is built with one in it
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Half-true. A router will provide you with the same level as protection as the built-in XP firewall. That is, it will block unsolicited inbound connections. Think of it as looking through the peephole on your front door: if you see your friend, whom you called and invited over, you'll let him in. If you see some Jehova's Witness, you'll let him stand out there in the heat/cold/rain/etc.
A router will not however provide program-level access control, or outbound filtering of any kind. This is where ZoneAlarm and other "personal firewalls" come into play. A personal firewall can also provide a vital secondary layer of protection in case for any reason malicious traffic gets passed from your router to your network. With your wide-open shares, this is important. With your wireless access point built into the router and enabled, this is doubly important. Wireless is insecure, period, full stop, end of story.
You do have working network cards in all involved computers right? The Network icon should only be absent if you either don't have a network card, or don't have the drivers for that network card installed.
It might be easier to simply install NetBEUI on the ME machines (and the XP if you want to share files to it) and bind that to File and Print sharing. NetBEUI requires no setup at all, just install, share, and go. If you do go the NetBEUI route, remember to go to the TCP/IP properties and on the bindings tab (for ME) UNCHECK File and Print sharing. That'll close a security hole.
Not sure where you would do that on XP, as I've only ever used TCP with my 2000 machines, never even had a second protocol installed on them.
Re: Networking 101
sorry about being a doofis I learn things the hard way 
Linear Mode
