Hey guys. I'm running Windows 7 and as of now I simply share folders as one usually does in Windows. I then have a MacBook with Leopard (Now Snow Leopard) which I use to connect to my computer to mount the shares by going to Finder, then CMD + K and typing smb://BlaenkPC (The name of my PC) into the address box. This consequently connects to my computer and mounts all of the shares.

The problem is that sometimes, if for example I close my MacBook (Which makes it go to sleep) or sometimes even without doing that, the connection somehow drops. Sometimes I close the MacBook and upon re-opening it, everything still works; it's random. It still shows the computer as being connected, but it just shows 'loading' indefinitely. If I hit 'eject' with the intention of re-connecting to the computer, it disappears from the sidebar (The Computer Icon) in Finder, but I cannot re-connect. Activity Monitor (or ps aux, whichever) both show hung instances of umount; one for each share that was mounted. I cannot kill these processes with kill or killall (Yes, even with sudo, and sending signal -9). This has happened to me before, and here is another person who has experienced this.

My question boils down to this: Is there an alternative method of sharing folders in Windows, that my Mac can read/understand, that is possibly more reliable and preferably just as fast? I usually use the mounted shares to watch television episodes off my computer, or movies, etc. (In other words, I open them in VLC and they automatically stream from my computer).

As far as I can tell, this is a problem with the Samba protocol. I have heard of NFS, but I am not sure if I would have to re-format my drives, or what. I don't mind running a service or daemon to allow the sharing of the folders, I just want it to be done and hopefully in a better way than typical Windows shares through Samba.

Usually when I encounter this problem, which is often (read: every day), I have no other option but to restart the MacBook. As I stated in the first question I linked to, shutting down and restarting don't work; I have to manually force the shutdown by holding the power button.

I have not modified my installation of Mac OS X in any hackish way, so I doubt it's something with the Operating System, but worst come to worst, I might end up reformatting and doing a clean install to see if that fixes anything, as I am at a complete loss as to what may be causing the problem, and no one else seems to have any idea or care, despite there being quite a few people suffering from this problem, as my research has shown.

Any pieces of information that can help are extremely appreciated. You don't have to answer every question on here, but maybe even some insight as to why it might not be possible to kill those hung umount instances for example, or why I may not be able to reconnect using samba (Is it something regarding the way the protocol works?).

One thing to note is that I have another computer in the home network that doesn't seem to have this problem. However, it is also running Windows 7 (Note though that I am not using the homegroup feature, but the typical windows sharing feature). My only deduction is that the problem is being caused by the way the Mac (Or Samba implementation, whichever) is handling things. Perhaps it is a limitation.