It seems like I cannot get away from this as an issue.

I’ve got a SME Server with samba 3.2.15 on it and I use it as my PDC for the Windows 7 workstations.

I wrote about settings etc for Windows 7 last year when I first had an issue, but it seemed to be ok.

This week while I built and installed a new PC for myself I could not get it to connect to the domain.

The error I kept getting was that the domain controller could not be found.

Having tried everything that I had used previously including the Samba registry settings, I ended up trawling via Google.

I located this website with a utility for joining domains.

And having downloaded and run it, it works. Simple as that. It just works.  I love it.

Strange thing is that it says that all it does is what I was doing manually. In any case, I am now joined to the samaba domain. Job done.