Samba WinXP Pro Mapped Drive Problem

You can see my original ordeal ​here.

Problem:
I am sure everyone is sick of hearing Samba questions, but this is driving me nuts. I have had a samba share setup for almost two years but I upgraded my desktop to WinXP Pro and it is driving me nuts!

Some background:
Running Samba 2.2.7

I am not doing anything fancy on samba - no PDC or anything. Plain ol' Workgroup. Example section:

[shared]
comment = Shared Files
path = /share/shared
public = yes
writable = yes
write list = me, acekitty
printable = no
force user = me
force group = me

I have this share mapped to my drive S on the WinXP machine. For some reason, the first time I double click in Explorer on the drive (after 'n' minutes of not accessing recently), explorer just hangs for like 2 minutes. Then it comes back like nothing was wrong! No errors on the server side. I have done the "Scheduled Tasks" possible problem fix I have seen many places:

When you connect to another computer, Windows checks for any Scheduled tasks on that computer. This can take up to 30 seconds. Open regedit and browse to key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft/Windows/Current Version/Explorer/RemoteComputer/NameSpace
Delete the {D6277990-4C6A-11CF-8D87-00AA0060F5BF} sub-key and reboot.

So, are you ready for the weirdest part of this problem? I am also running WinXP Pro on my laptop and it has NEVER had this problem from day 1!?!?

Absolutely any help would be greatly appreciated.

• RR

Solution:

After tons and tons of research I learned that Samba was NOT the problem!

It was just plain ol' Windows being stupid. First, I found this page: ​here which I am linking here because if anyone else ever stumbles upon this post it may fix their problem, and it shows some control panel that there seems to be no other way to reach!?!?

Next I found (part of) my solution ​here.

It seems that the service "WebClient" is what is screwing me over. However… combining these two solutions STILL didn't quite work for me… every time I booted up I had to re-enter my share passwords!

Which brings me to why the problem is so original (IMO). I have only one user on this machine, with no password. So WinXP was automagically booting into that account. To get the mounted share to work, I had to do the following fun:

1. Run 'control userpasswords2' and wipe all remembered passwords.
2. Add a password to my WinXP account (whose name has always matched the samba server account).
3. Use TweakUI to automatic login the user on bootup.
4. Disable the 'WebClient' service.
5. Reboot

I tried various permutations, and this was the only one that worked, so all the steps seemed to be required. This does not explain why my laptop has worked fine from day one. They both have the same NetBIOS settings, host files, mapped drives, etc, etc…

Thanx for trying! I now have my M, P, S, and W drives back!

• RR