Hi.

This one is driving me nuts. I hope that someone might have some insight that will make me sleep easier, before I take a hammer to the machine

OK. Here's the scenario. I have a moderately complex home network, running gigabit ethernet between several servers and a mix of desktop and laptop machines with different OSs on. There are three linux boxes running three different versions of linux with three different versions of samba. All are configured in essentially the same way but with different shares and different purposes, thse being a media server, a data server, and a mail server.

There is also the tape server, which is normally off, only on when it's needed, with a large LTO3 tape robot connected to it.

Everything is connected to the cable router and each other via three 8 port gigabit switches. Recently, as in about two weeks ago, everything was taken apart and rebuilt when I moved my office from one room to another, so now more or less everything is in one room. It worked fine there until two days ago. Then it went odd.

Everything except for the windows 7 box is still running perfectly happily. All the various laptop and desktop machines can see each other and the servers, can mount samba shares, copy files around, do all the things you'd want. The damn 7 box, though, two days ago suddenly decided not to work right with the data and mail servers.

It will see a share, connect to it, let you list a directory, copy files to it and from it, create and delete directories, all the normal things. But it will NOT allow you to open a file in place. IE, if you double click a text file on the server it doesn't work. You can copy it to the windows 7 box then open it, that works. Doesn't matter what the file type is it doesn't work.

The way it fails is that you get a slow green progress bar crawling across every file explorer window open on a network share a few seconds after you try to access the file, regardless of whether that window had the file in. Nothing else happens, and at that point you can't use the network browser at all. This process will apparently never end, I've left it running for a couple of hours with no luck.

If you do ipconfig /release in a command window the program that should have started instantly starts, then complains about the lack of network connectivity and can't load the file, which is fair enough. Renewing the lease will allow the network to work again, except that this behaviour will repeat.

I've googled it, tried everything I can think of from both hardware and software, with no luck. So far I have:

Completely rearranged the network, tried different switches, cables, topology, etc.

Uninstalled and reinstalled samba on the two affected servers, fiddled with smb.conf for hours, tested them in every way I can think of.

Uninstalled anything that might have been installed on the machine in the last week.

Uninstalled and reinstalled the ethernet drivers on the windows box on the off chance it would help.

Tried altering a number of settings in windows I found during my search.

Removed as much as possible from the network, leaving only the router, the windows box, and the data server connected.

And many other little tweaks. Nothing has had any effect one way or the other. Except for this behaviour the machine works fine, web browsing, email, video playback from the media server, all that works correctly.

The two XP machines and the linux laptop I tried all work with all three servers perfectly, as they always have done. The network and the servers are, I'm 99% sure, not the problem.

Ideas?

Clearly the thing is waiting for something to happen, but as usual there is no feedback at all to tell me what or why. It just stops. Three days ago it worked perfectly, as it has done for over a year. I did a windows update about eight or nine days ago but it's been rebooted numerous times between then and when it went weird. Twice today, just to add insult to injury, it went through a brief period of working right for about a minute, once on each server but at different times. It then immediately died again and I have no idea what, if anything, I did to make it work. I'm stumped. And annoyed.

pca