> Any insight appreaced, I'm off to search for answers...

I once had a problem with smb shares mounted on a Linux box disconnecting
after a certain length of time. my (hackish, but functional) solution, was
a cron job to do an 'ls' on the Windows share every few minutes (redirected
to /dev/null). 

this kept me from doing backups of an empty directory. :)

Carl Soderstrom
-- 
Network Engineer
Real-Time Enterprises
(952) 943-8700