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 that is running Samba and thus probably a really old and out of date version of it.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.