3.2.7 vs 3.5 locking logic/mechanism - locking denied to non-owners

[lejeczek]

hi everybody

I hope you don't mind me posting here but I've had no lock 
on the users list

I cannot work this problem out and it's potentially big 
problem for me

win xp sp3 client
samba 3.2.7 on sles 11 (plain no SPs)
samba 3.5.10 on rhel 6.1
read-only share

and one app(java based) the the front end to a user on that 
xp client, that does not write anything back to the resource 
but still fails on 3.5.10: "File is in-use by another process"

this is what I think goes on:
3.5.10 somehow denies some sort of locking to the client
no such problem with 3.2.7

if I level up the logs

on 3.5.10 : fetch_share_mode_unlocked: no share_mode record 
around (file not open)
on 3.2.7 : is_locked: flavour = WINDOWS_LOCK brl 
start=1733591040 len=61440 unlocked for fnum 10659 file

another peculiar behaviour
on rhel 6.1 (even with locking = no)
3.5.10-115.el6_2 - read-only share and client will fail no 
matter what
3.5.4-68.el6  - same share, client will succeed but only if 
data tree is owned by accessing user

I've compared runtime configs and virtually they look almost 
identical, well, where the differences are they look 
unrelated to the issue, at least to me.
I only cannot rpmrebuild 3.2.7 source, which is suse on 
rhel, build fails, so I could tell 100% it's not OS, right?
the java app itself unfortunately it's proprietary soft

what I'd like to have working OK is that client accessing a 
3.5 read-only share like 3.2.7 does, regardless of 
permissions, meaning not needing to be the owner (which sort 
of makes no sense since it's read only, right?)

any advice greatly appreciated
thanks