Well, it wasn't quite that simple. Another 5 hours of uninstalling, reinstalling, rebooting etc to get the server to see my wife's computer even after getting the automatic login to work.
Evidently the server doesn't pick up on the name change. What finally worked was removing her as a user, reboot both hers and the server. (still no connection) and strangely after all that, I needed to add her back as a user and in media collector, reboot both again, remove and reinstall and this time it finds her. (properly I think) None of it makes any logical sense.

Maybe there's the problem, Don't think logically!!!!

John, yep, the setup without passwords was just because I was having so many problems and wanted to simplify everything as much as possible. My wife's and mine are now strong passworded along with the MSS.

Wookie, thank you for the update but I still had something odd with both machines. They are both older XP's but updated with all Microsoft updates including SP3. I am not using the admin account on either machine, just the default standard setup with admin privileges. No guest account is set up on mine, my wife's or the MSS.

The bit that I don't understand and that I needed the workaround from the link I included in my post, is the internal naming of our user account. I will try to describe what I did. (my wife's is an identical setup).

With all my problems, I restored my laptop back to factory settings. Initial XP setup gave me a user name of either owner or myyname. I don't remember which. If it was owner, I changed it to myname shortly thereafter. I passworded it and then installed the MSS. I created an account on MSS of myname with the same password.
This is where the struggle began. The MSS didn't think the users were the same! What followed was innumerable attempts at various configurations with no luck. Then somewhere along the way, after yet another reboot, the MSS tool tray popped up an error saying the password didn't match for OWNER! I checked my user name again and it was myname on my computer and on the MSS. (no "owner" username in sight)

This led to a new search and my finding that link where I could do what I assume is a lower level rename of my username with "control userpasswords2". This finally did the trick. I used the same technique on my wife's and it worked there as well. If anyone can tell me what is actually going on, I would love to know.

One final addendum for weirdness. The MSS is connecting to both computers fine, it's backing up, collecting etc. What is still strange is that the folder naming seems out of whack. For example, the media collector has pulled videos from my wife's computer and automatically put them into a folder named owner.hername.000

It's almost as though there are still left over remnants of that original "owner" username that I thought was gone. It all seems to be working, but that folder naming thing makes me concerned about future issues.

Thank you Very much for all the help!