[Samba] samba 3.0.4 domain woes

[Ninti Systems]

G'day:

Folks, I'm at my wits end trying to join a WIN XP Professional client to
a samba 3.0.4 domain running on Slackware 9.1. I haven't used windows
since Win 95 days and am not up to speed with it at all. Also, i've
tried the O'Reilly Using Samba book (2nd edition), read the samba docs,
and browsed the mailing lists but there is so much information I'm even
more bamboozled than ever.

I have some questions I hope someone might shed some light on for me:

- Does pdbedit completely replace smbpasswd as an account creation tool?
- Can I forget about mksmbpasswd.sh now? It doesn't appear to be
included now anyway.

- If i do away with WINS, lmhosts and broadcasts and go the DNS route,
do I also need LDAP and Kerberos etc (the whole Active Directory show)?
I get errors when trying to use DNS to resolve names, I know why (DNS
SRV records), but I don't know if just adding those records will solve
the problem without also doing LDAP and Kerberos.

I have samba 3.0.4 set up and running. I can connect, authenticate and
see shares locally from the server. I could also see the server name
(NOT the domain name) from Win XP client using 'net view' for a while. I
could never login in to the domain, and now Win XP is telling me the
domain is unavailable. I've been at this for days (samba 3.0.3 on RedHat
previously), with the samba server's availability, logging in and
available shares all seemingly coming and going at random. 

I have valid user accounts, machine accounts, everything looks OK, but
samba just won't do domains at all. 

Mick