Same problem, tried all the hints & tricks. . . only success I've had is from the console, with the mount_smbfs command. This worked & as a workaround I have written it into a shell script & compiled an apple script application to execute it, then placed that in logon items. You have to open a new finder window to get it to show up, but then the share magically appears on the desktop!
The fact that I am able to connect to smb shares from a terminal window (WITHOUT the clear-text authentication trick) but not from within the finder makes me think there is a problem with the implementation of smb in the new tiger interface. I stumbled across a post on macosxhints.com stating that there is a bug in tiger's smb client authentication, supposedly it encrypts passwords to share-security servers but not user-security ones, as would be the case in a Windows domain (vs a peer-to-peer workgroup, if I follow this correctly.) This would cause problems with current versions of Windows and would not be addressed by the nsmb minauth trick (which really only applies to pre-SP3 NT and some other platforms besides Microsoft.)
One other thought, I had to specify the -I switch for mount_smbfs to get it to work, pointing to a possible name resolution problem (unfortunately smb://ip_address doesn't work in finder)
One other thread here stated that using CIFS:// instead of SMB:// worked, haven't had the chance to try that myself yet.
