Andre,

>>Anyhow, I tried rolling back to 2.2.8a, just in case.
>>
>>Same result. I read somewhere that the SMB filesystem might need to be
> 
> It must be a samba misconfiguration, Samba 2.2.8a does work for me.

I'm not sure what I have changed, but Samba is working okay, now. My 
Samba config file has not changed. My kernel has not changed (haven't 
even rebooted!). I did fix a problem in my /etc/group file where either 
useradd or userdel jacked-up one of the group lines, but I've gone back 
and re-broken it to see if that was the problem.

Strange... well, thanks for listening to me flounder.

-chris