Security Precautions - Connecting Company Laptop to Home Network

[phkhgh]

Need suggestions on security steps when (or before) connect wife's school issued laptop to our home network. It'll be wireless.

Main concerns: over years have learned many public schools' security measures & practices are behind times; AND teachers (on the network) d/l a LOT of junk.

1) Steps to minimize chance of school laptop infecting our home networked computers when she has to use our internet from home.

2) Risks (if any) of putting our home network password on school laptop. If stolen, I'd immediately change our netwk PW. May be other risks I'm unaware of?

Haven't had time to learn about this school's security software, practices etc.
School laptop has XP Pro SP3. She has limited user acct, but could get around that if necessary.
It has lots of stuff previous "owner" put on it (Spybot, CCleaner, etc) - lot can't be run w/o admin permission. For now, don't know if can do ANY manual virus scan, esp w/o being connected to their network.

Home network has Linksys WRT54GL, w/ WPA2-P, TKIP +AES, w/ VERY strong PW.

Home desktop uses Vista x64 SP1 - usu running a limited user acct.
Her personal laptop is Vista 32. Both have latest KIS - always up to date.

Suggestions or links to articles / posts would be appreciated!

[Variable]

You need to decide whether her laptop will need to share files with your home network and vice versa or not. If your two machines are not going to need to share files, you may be able to set up firewall rules to block all internal traffic except to your other LAN machine. If you don't share files between any machine, you could turn off file and print sharing all together.

If you decide you need to share files between the school and home machines, your only security is the AV/firewall software installed. Make sure they are up to date, disable any trust relationship between AV's (if you have that option in the AV configuration options). That is about all you can do. By far the greatest risk comes from viruses that spread to shared drives - these exist, but not all viruses do that. If you have an active, up-to-date, and effective, AV running on your machines you are pretty safe from viruses.

[phkhgh]

Thanks Variable,
Posted on Kaspersky forum for possible settings.

I occasionally share files w/ 2 home computers - usua from Public folder. Could turn off until need it. But the 2 stmts from Vista's File Sharing Help confuse me - kinda seem contradictory (I'm sure MS has better KB on this).
You cannot choose which individuals can access the Public folder from the network. You must either grant access to everyone on the network, or to no one. You can, however, set the permission level...
In next Help paragraph:
You can also turn on password-protected sharing. This limits network access to the Public folder to only those people with a user account and password on your computer.

Haven't played w/ this - sounds (looked) like when setting PW protections on Public folder in Network & Sharing, it's asking for the Admin PW (on my desktop)? Not big problem w/ just me & wife, but for others... Is that really what it's saying?

[phkhgh]

Edit: This doesn't address any potential problems except filesharing, but there's a fairly lengthy article on MS Technet about filesharing & password protection http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb727037.aspx