nt win/pdc can see other samba/wins server

[Paonia Ezrine]

We have a nt 4.0/backoffice 4.5 server that acts as our wins server for
our east coast office.
We have a samba server (2.0.4b) on the west coast with:
  wins support = yes
        local master = yes
        remote browse sync = 192.168.8.57
        remote announce = 192.168.8.57/DOMAIN
in terms of dns the east cost is co.com and the west coast is co-west.com

the east and west each have a private class c which are linked via a vpn
box.

When I enter the west coast samba server in the wins config for the nt box
it says it can find/connect to it. If we do a start-find-computer it find
it but cant mount it.
I ran tcpdump on the west coast machine and when it is tried to be added
to the wins server list I do not see any traffic. Any idea what is going
on here and how to fix it.
thanks
paonia