A couple of months back, I did a nice fresh installation of Ubuntu 10.10 on my laptop - on a shiny new Seagate Momentus XT drive. All was well, and I could connect to my Windows machine's file shares just fine.
Fast forward to today. I hadn't tried connecting to the Windows file shares for a while, but wanted to grab something off my desktop machine. No matter what I tried, I couldn't get the laptop to connect to the Windows machine's file shares. I ended up attempting to manually invoke smbclient, with the debug flag set to maximum debug level, in the hopes that it would shed some light on the situation. The best that I got from that was these two lines:
SPNEGO login failed: Invalid parameterwhich didn't really shed much light on it.
session setup failed: SUCCESS - 0
A bit of googling around found a few people who'd done the same thing to debug smbclient connection failures, but they mostly turned out to be trying to create null connections (no user/pass - not even the "guest" user), which Windows doesn't like. Then, I managed to find this post, which gives the actual solution to my problem.
The solution? Uninstall "Windows Live Essentials" from the Windows 7 machine. Seriously. I'd installed Windows Movie Maker - which, these days, is part of Windows Live Essentials - a month or two back, and that was apparently enough to completely prevent samba/smbclient from connecting to that machine. Upon uninstalling Windows Movie Maker, the shares started working again immediately!
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