Zap the PRAM on both machines. My beige G3 would occasionally not see Appletalk resources because something was "off" with the Appletalk settings that wasn't obvious. The Appletalk protocol is self discovering and self configuring, it should literally be plug and play. Also ditch the MacIP server, you don't need it for file sharing. If its that virtual machine, netatalk running on the *NIX box in "no zone" mode can cause strange problems. Open Transport is completely optional, the classic networking in 7.1 should work fine for this.