[Samba] smbd to 100%, hangs samba - HELP!

[Danny Yee]

I'm running pretty bog-standard RedHat 7.3, samba 2.2.3a.  I upgraded
to that a month ago and there were no problems until Monday afternoon,
when samba hung and all my Windows users reported problems.  Running
top revealed an smbd process using 99% CPU and killing that fixed
the problem -- until it recurred a few hours later.

I've tried restarting samba completely, rewriting my smb.conf (from
smb.conf.rpmnew), and turning on logging (level 1), but the problem
keeps recurring.  The offending smbd process is owned by a different
user each time, so it doesn't look like some kind of out-of-control
client problem.  And the time-to-failure is also unpredictable --
sometimes it dies less than an hour after being restarted, but it
has run for five hours in the middle of the day (and it runs fine
overnight, with no activity).

I'm at the pulling-out-hair stage over this one.  There's nothing
enlightening in the logs that I can see, but I'll send them and my
smb.conf if anyone thinks they might be informative.

Danny.
Computer Network Manager
Department of Anatomy and Histology
University of Sydney