[Samba] directory does not exist?

[Ed Sweetman]

I'm sure this has been brought up before but i searched through the last 
few months of archives and i couldn't find any mention of it.  I've been 
having this problem in debian unstable for the past few months and it's 
seriously got me within 2 inches of deciding to invent a way to make 
computer programs feal pain.  For some reason (my all anonymous access) 
setup only lets you see the top level of a share and says all the 
directories in it do not exist when you try to enter them.  I didn't 
change the permissions of these directories since it worked so I take it 
  either it's something to do with something samba depends on that is 
provided by debian or a configuration directive that has changed and i 
do not have (though i doubt that).  I cant think of why this is 
happening and i've been trying numerous versions with the same result. 
Samba 2.2 does it and so does the latest 3.0.  I'm accessing from a 
windows 98 machine.  Could this be a subtle networking error?