Weird disappearing shares problems

[Niall Murphy]

Hi folks,

I'm experiencing a set of weird problems trying to replace a samba 2.0.7 setup
with something a bit more modern (I've tried both 2.2.2 and 3.0-alpha13). The samba
2.0.7 setup used a -tng server to perform the PDC functions of authentication,
etc, because at that time 2.0 was much faster for filesharing.

Anyway, the particular problem I am having at the moment is that, given certain
initial conditions, which I will describe later, even though an NT 4 machine
can authenticate and log in correctly it can never find the roaming profile.
Furthermore it cannot list the shares ("net view") returning errors like 
"network path not found". However, *if* the samba server is restarted, the
NT 4 machine can list the shares, although any attempt to mount them
("net use") results in the previous list of shares disappearing from the
Explorer window which showed them, replaced solely by the Printers share!
Furthermore the "net use" itself fails with either error 67 or 5.
W2K appears to work fine although it cannot print for a reason which I will
assume is unrelated.

Now, I have gone through DIAGNOSIS.TXT but since I am currently using
an -alpha product I can't take everything that it says as gospel. I have
however verified that the infrastructural requirements are in place:
i.e. both machines know each other by name, packet filtering isn't stopping
anything happening, DNS resolution is in place and nmblookup
returns the expected results. 

Environment: NT 4 laptop, bog standard service pack 6A.
Samba server running on a multiprocessor HP box. (As I said, the previous
2.0.7 and -tng server combination, which is running on a separate virtual
IP address, allows this laptop to authenticate and use all resources fine.)

More full smb.conf etc can be provided on request.

Anyone any ideas?

Niall