Here I have a Samba server (Debian 5.0) thats is configured to host Windows XP profiles.

Clients connects to this server and work on their profiles directly on the samba share (the profile is not copied locally).

Every now and then, a client may not shutdown properly and thus Windows does not free the file locks. When looking at the samba locking table, we can see that many files are still locked even though the client is not connected anymore. In our case, this seems to occur with lockfiles created by Mozilla Thunderbird and Firefox. Here's an example of the samba locking table:

# smbstatus -L | grep DENY_ALL | head -n5
Pid          Uid        DenyMode   Access      R/W        Oplock           SharePath   Name   Time
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
15494        10345      DENY_ALL   0x3019f     RDWR       EXCLUSIVE+BATCH  /home/CORP/user1   app.profile/user1.thunderbird/parent.lock   Mon Nov 22 07:12:45 2010
18040        10454      DENY_ALL   0x3019f     RDWR       EXCLUSIVE+BATCH  /home/CORP/user2   app.profile/user2.thunderbird/parent.lock   Mon Nov 22 11:20:45 2010
26466        10056      DENY_ALL   0x3019f     RDWR       EXCLUSIVE+BATCH  /home/CORP/user3   app.profile/user3.firefox/parent.lock   Mon Nov 22 08:48:23 2010

We can see that the files were opened by Windows and imposed a DENY_ALL lock.

Now when a client reconnects to this share and tries to open those files, samba says that they are locked and denies access.

Is there any way to work around this situation or am I missing something?

Edit: We would like to avoid disabling file locks on the samba server because there are good reasons to have those enabled.