[Samba] Indentifier muddle

[Darryl]

Hi, all.
Samba 3.022 on Ubuntu Edgy:

I have a situation where win XP clients logon to our one and only PDC.
They access home dirs and save stuff there. They can also, for e.g add
a shortcut to their desktop.
Wierd thing is any edits to screen effects are dropped, for instance.
They also can't set the proxy server address & port in IE. A check
after they click OK shows the entry has been discarded. Other normal
user settings are also dropped.
Imap mail via Thunderbird works.

MS office programs wnat to install every time accessed after logging
on. Seems like any profile change is not retained. I know you're
thinking the profiles are read only, but they're writeable, owned by
the correct user and accessible.
No logs give any hint.

Could it be because we had a hardware crash.
After re-installing, I did a net setlocalsid and replaced the new sid
with the old one. I carefully added /etc/passwd, shadow & group files
to the new installation. (These  from the crashed system which ran
SuSE 10.0)
I put the secrets.tdb file where it used to be ion SuSE 10.0, but
that's the wrong place for Ubuntu. in the wrong place without
realizing it :(

Upshot was I had to rejoin clients to the network. Currently I'm
experiencing the above issues - are these related to the then
misplaced secrets.tdb file?
Replacing the current secrets.tdb with the old does nothing.

We are a school in Cape Town. I'm no samba expert, but I really need
to get this sorted.
Any pointers would really be appreciated.
Thanks in advance,

-- 
Regards,
Darryl
---
"When last did I run a backup?"
---