Binary package hint: libgnomevfs2-extra
When using the "Places->Network Servers" menu in Ubuntu 6.10, in our network, one first sees an icon titled "Windows Network". After doubleclicking on this icon, a list of workgroup names appear, some have an icon representing this, some have a blank rectangular icon. When doubleclicking on a non-blank icon, one sees the hosts without that workgroup, and again, some are represented with a blank icon, other with a "real" icon. When one doubleclicks on such a "real" icon, the shares are shown as they should be.
The problem occurs with the groups and hosts represented by the blank icons. When clicking on those, we're getting a errormessage saying: "Couldn't display smb://edm/WVANHAEVRE. The location is not a folder.".
What is very weird, is that by using the "Reload" button on Nautilus, the icons of the hosts change, in that some that used to have a blank icon, get a real one, and some having a real one, get a blank icon. Which one gets which icon seems to happen at random.
This makes browsing very unpleasant, and rather unusable. It gives it a rather broken appearance.
I will try to attach some screenshots illustrating this. If this can't be done within lanchpad, I'll upload them to Flickr.
A colleague of mine (W. Vanhaevre) first encountered this bug, it was easily reproducable on my system. Both are running an up-to-date Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy) on x86 hardware.
The problem seems to be specific to the browsing/discovery part of the SMB protocol, as directly accessing servers through their name works fine e.g. smb://hostname/