I've been using samba with many windows machines for many years and never had this problem before, and google has no record of it happening anywhere. So either I'm incredibly stupid or unlucky, I'm not sure which.

I'm running Debian with a backported 2.6 kernel and samba 3, and connecting to it from a windows 2000 machine, all working fine. After my hard drive failure and subsequent reinstallation of w2k, I wanted my linux share to appear as a networked drive in windows as it did before, so I went to 'map network drive', typed in the share path and set it to connect with different username and password. It connected fine, as I expected it to, so I thought nothing more of it. Until I rebooted and got "Invalid username or password".

Tracked it down to the following line in my samba log:

smbd/password.c:authorise_login(573)
authorise_login: rejected invalid user nobody

So windows was trying to connect without the username+password I had set when I mapped the network drive.

After much prodding of bits and pieces, I eventually tracked it down to something annoyingly simple; it turns out that windows seems to forget these things when you don't have a password set on your windows account. So set a password, remount the drive and it all works fine.

Nowhere does windows say that if I don't set a password on my account, my network username and password will not be remembered. Neither does it have a button to set who to automatically log the machine on as, it only pops up at the end of the control panel -> users options. So I guess I'm off the hook as far as stupid goes. Well, I'd like to think so.