I'm running debian etch with samba v3, and after running about 1 day, nexttime I try to connect a share, it doesn't work anymore . If I go to theswat interface, I only see about 4 icons, all the icons of shares & printersetc. aren't there anymore . Restarting the services doesn't solve the problem, only a reboot works .
Had a problem with my Samba too in a similar regard. This should put you on the right track. It seems to be an installer bug that can be overcome if you compile from source (which I haven't tried on my NSLU2....yet....)
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=445566 Regards, Dave