[PLUG] Weird Samba, or is it weird Nautilus?

[Dick Steffens]

I've been having trouble connecting to my wife's Windows 7 machine from 
my Ubuntu 14.04 machine.

When I click Places > Network and then right-click [wife's machine] the 
context menu that pops up offers "Open with videos", which it will try 
to do if I let it. Videos (which looks like Totem) comes up and 
complains. It takes several clicks on "Close" to clear. So, one question 
is, how do I replace "Open with Videos" with "Files", which I believe is 
the correct tool?

If I right-click and choose "Open with" the first alternative is "Sound 
Converter". After that is "Other Application..." If I choose "Other 
Application..." I get:

     No applications available to open "smb-server-[wife's machine]"
     Click "Show other applications", for more options, or "Find 
applications online" to install a new application.

"Show Other Applications" brings up a list that includes two entries 
labeled "Files". Sometimes choosing one of them works. Other times 
Nautilus crashes. When I start up Nautilus again, the connection to 
[wife's machine] is there and I can browse to the folder I'm looking for.

So, where can I find documentation that tells me what is actually going 
on so I can try it from the command line, one step at a time, and see if 
I can figure out why this works sometimes, and not others?

And, just to make it interesting, I just tried to find the error message 
Videos puts up by right clicking on [wife's machine] and clicking "Open 
with videos". Nautilus presented me with a list of folders on [wife's 
machine]. I right-clicked on "Users" and chose, "Open with files", but 
it opened with Videos. The error message:

     An error occurred

     An audio or video stream is not handled due to missing codecs. You 
might need
     to install additional plugins to be able to play some types of movies

I tried to close the error message box and found that there are seven 
copies of it. I had to close them in the right order (by trial and 
error) to get them to go away.

The playlist pane in Videos shows a whole bunch of stuff in the folder 
on [wife's machine].

I was able to close Videos.

I tried again, got Videos instead of Files, got more than a dozen error 
message boxes, finally got them all closed, closed Totem, and tried to 
open by choosing Files from the other applications list, and Nautilus 
crashed. After restarting Nautilus the connection to [wife's machine] is 
present and works as expected.

Sigh.

-- 
Regards,

Dick Steffens