[PLUG] Intra-networking inconsistent

[Richard C. Steffens]

I've had a home network for many years. I connect to my wife's Winders 7 
machine using Samba. Sometimes the connection works easily, and other 
times it does not. When she had Winders XP I could make a connection 
from my Ubuntu 10.04 desktop machine to a designated folder on her 
machine (named Transfer), and leave it mounted. If I needed to put 
something there I could drag from wherever on my machine to the icon 
representing that folder on her machine. Something changed when she got 
a new machine with Winders 7. Now, I can connect from my desktop to 
hers, but the icon no longer represents the folder I used to connect to, 
but several layers up. I can leave the connection mounted, but I have to 
open a Nautilus window and drill down to her Transfer folder. That's 
annoying, but I can live with it. I just have to double click on that 
icon to open a Nautilus window and proceed from there.

This morning I opened a connection to her machine, drilled down to her 
Transfer folder, and transferred some files. I left that Nautilus window 
open but minimized and went on with other things. This afternoon I had 
some more things to move to her Transfer folder, so I restored the 
Nautilus window and tried to copy some files. Something happened to the 
connection and the copy stalled. I closed that Nautilus window and tried 
opening a new one. No success. So, I unmounted that connection and 
opened a new one. There was some delay, including a small window that 
told me it was working on it, but then it worked fine.

A separate problem arose this afternoon when I tried to connect to my 
laptop, which is also running Ubuntu 10.04. For reasons I don't 
understand, I can see my desktop machine from my laptop, through Samba, 
but can't see any directories. Likewise, while I could see my laptop 
from my desktop machine via Samba, I could not see any directories on 
the laptop.

Of course, in the process of writing this e-mail I went through the 
steps again. I still can't see my desktop machine from my laptop, but I 
can see my laptop from my desktop machine, and I can get to a shared 
directory.

Can anyone recommend some reading on this subject so I can whack myself 
with a suitable clue stick? (Or, feel free to whack me with said stick 
yourself.)

Thanks.

-- 
Regards,

Dick Steffens