Can Blender access network drives?

I’m running blender 2.49 on XP and I can’t get it to access files on our company’s network. When I double-click on a .blend file in a shared drive, blender just gives me the “cannot open file” error. Also, when I try and type the name of the drive into Blender’s file browser, it doesn’t recognize it and says “Make dir?”.

Any thoughts on how to fix this/ is it fixable?