If that is happening, I'd be inclined to blame the Win 2K box for stopping the Win 7 box from connecting to it. Something to do with its network settings maybe? No firewall stopping anything is there?

Are you able to turn off Simple Sharing on the edition of Windows 7 you have?

Try creating a new user account on the 2k box, thats what i had to do to get XP to talk to 7. Also theres a cache somewhere of credentials on win 7, could be using wrong details from that?

It could be the 2k box, it was acting flaky when I tried to browse it from linux: at first I could, then I couldn't. It's been so long since I needed to do any networking to it I've completely forgotten what I may have done. And yes, it does have a firewall (an ancient version of zonealarm), though poking around didn't yield any insights into the problem. Anyway, it seems to be a moot point. Nice thing about win7 is that it detected and installed drivers for our printer (which I had neglected to do) as soon as I plugged it in. mrs.D on first inspection seems well pleased with it, though a bit taken aback by some of the changes (she's been on 2k since forever).

Since circa 2000, shirley?

Zonealarm will definitely¹ be the problem. You shouldn't need it if you're behind a router, unless you're monitoring outbound traffic? Stop it (or better still remove it entirely) and the network shares will probably work².

1 Not guaranteed. 2 Also not a guaranteed.

Cripes - zone alarm is a name I've not heard for ages.

What Matt said - just uninstall it!

I use it to keep jimmy from phoning home -- it's highly efective for that if nothing else.

Anyway, after swapping in the new pc and setting up the old on my junkpile desk, the old is allowing network connections per usual (and this after sorting out that I plugged the cable into the wrong nic when I moved it). So maybe everything just had to be rebooted to sort itself out.

I had to use a keyboard that is so grungy it looks like it was puked on, even though it wasn't, not that I can remember. Well, maybe... Ick.

Damn. spoke too soon. Well, I can now connect to the old pc from linux, but Win 7 is still choking on the password. In my browsing yesterday I did come across some password problems that need to be addressed by a registry modification, which is apparently for pro versions, since I couldn't find the key in home premium.

:D

http://www.tannerwilliamson.com/2009/09/14/windows-7-seven-network-file-sharing-fix-samba-smb/

Windows 7 Home Premium users, READ THIS:

Windows 7 Home premium users do not have the ability to follow the above instructions, and will instead have to do these instructions contributed by commenter “James”.

FOR HOME EDITION
1 . Open registry editor ( Start search – regedit)
2 . Browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa
3. Create a new DWORD value with the following properties:
NAME: LmCompatibilityLevel
VALUE: 1
4. Restart your PC and try the connection again…

2009? I wonder how relevant that still is. Seems like a several of the comments are from people who are trying to connect to consumer hardware devices (Squeezebox, Synology NAS, etc.) that is running Samba and thus probably a really old and out of date version of it.

I've never had any such problems with Windows 7 accessing Samba shares on my server running Ubuntu 12.04, or vice-versa for that matter.

I dunno, but it's the most plausible explanation I've seen thus far. Is Ubuntu 12.04 running Samba 4, because that's supposed to be more compatible with latest windows (or maybe ubuntu backported the patch for it, which they've been known to do, unlike microsoft)?

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2793313

Edit: Must be true because I applied the patch to Windows 7 registry, rebooted and Windows 7 can now see all the shares on W2k and connect straight up with no password hassles.

Ubuntu 12.04 is running Samba 3.6.3 according to my server. Not really surprised that Microsoft haven't back-ported the patch to a 13 year old operating system though. Not even Ubuntu would provide support for distributions that old!

It turns out they did, but I applied the patch to win7 instead.