[Samba] Office 2003 hangs when writing to share

[gammer.org]

I am having a problem writing/saving to a SMB share with O2K3(Word). In WORD, if I File/SaveAs \\machine\share\fred.doc - the windows machine hangs completely (Explorer+Word immediately, then all other processes after a period of say 1min).

Most other scenarios succeed:
ok: File/SaveAs C:\fred.doc, then move to \\machine\share using explorer.
ok: Outlook.PST file on \\machine\share can be written to.
ok: iTunes\library on \\machine\share\My Docs\iTunes\ can be written to.
ok: Notepad save to \\machine\share succeeds.

Permissions on the share/directory at the linux level (suse 9.3) are rwx/rwx/rwx.
Create mask is 0777 (in fact all masks are 0777).
locking = no
strict locking = no

Linux is SuSE 9.3
Samba is 3.0.9
Windows is XP SP2
Office is 2003
WinXP Firewall is OFF.

WinXP and O2K3 are fresh installs.

Any ideas pls?