Windows 7 has some special requirements for it to become a member of a Samba based Windows domain.

I worked through a number options including trying the old Windows XP solution of changing the registry settings NetlogonParametersRequireStrongKey but this did not work.

There are also many mentions of the Network Security: LAN Manager authentication level change to “LM and NTLM – use NTLMV2 session security if negotiated” but that did not work on the two systems I have tried and after setting that back I changed just the two LANmanWorkstation settings as per this link.

http://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Windows7

Worked fine with both an older Windows 7 downloaded installation and on my Windows7 notebook from TechEd AU 2009. But it failed on a Dell system that has been upgraded to Win7. Still working on that one.

An Update:

I updated the Samba version on the SMEServer that I was trying to connect to from Samba v3.0.33 to Samba v3.2.15 (using the sernet archive) and tried to connect the Dell notebook again using the modified registry settings as per this post and it worked first time.