Another thing that once bit me is to make sure the netmasks on both machines match. Strange things happen if they don't. Also, I never used Wins with Samba. I just made sure the workgroup name on both machines was the same. Lastly, I don't know if this is different now, but a few years ago when I was working with Samba, if I set a password on a drive in Windows, I had to type it in all caps on the Linux side for it to be accepted.
