"I go to start-> shut down, and instead of those 3 boxes that usually comes up, a windows xp box comes w/ the drop down menu's w/ the options."
Sounds lke the Welcome screen is turned off. To turn it back on, so to
User Accounts in the Control Panel. From there, choose
Change the way users log on and off. Check the Welcome Screen Box
"also on start, it's asking for login information.
How can i make it so that it automatically logs in?"
The way I do it is through
Tweakui It has a lot of tweaks for XP.
As for the network problems, not sure whats going on there. One thing you can try is to go the the System Properties (Right click on My Computer & select Properties). Then go to the
Computer Name tab. Try selecting Change, then select a different name for each computer. Create the same Workgroup on each system. They should see each other now.