Before I describe my problem, let me describe my setup --

-- FreeBSD 5.2.1 (yes, I know this is a Linux forum. Forgive me
-- Samba 3.0.4
-- NIS
-- Samba is acting as a primary domain controller with Windows XP Professional clients

In an attempt at unified logins with roaming profiles, I'm trying to setup samba as a primary domain controller for my Windows clients to login to. I've read up the best I could on this, drawing mainly from "Using Samba" "Sam's Teach Yourself Samba", the FreeBSD handbook, the Samba documentation and just Googling around. NIS is acting as my domain server, and I've configured it per the instructions laid-out in the FreeBSD handbook (chrisranjana.com/freebsd-handbook-documentation/network-nis.html). Samba is configured with the appropriate paths and permissions for roaming profiles, logins and home directories. Samba points to my NIS server (on the same machine) for the domain in smb.conf. Samba is acting as a PDC.

After I configured NIS and Samba, I added shell-less home-less group-less users (per the instructions in "Using Samba") with the adduser command for each client workstation that will logon. I appended each user with an "$", to denote a machine was being added. I then updated my NIS setup and remapped the logins with ypinit -u, followed by an /etc/netstart. So far so good. I then added my users with smbpasswd. I added root with smbpasswd -a root, then added machines (by NetBIOS names consistent with the recently added user entries) with smbpasswd -a -m machine$. No errors. I reboot the machine. No problems yet. NIS, yppasswd, etc... are all running without hiccups. I go over to my Windows XP Professional workstation, and join the domain. It asks for an initial admin login to join the domain, so I login with root. I'm greeted with a "Welcome to domain x" , followed by instructions to reboot. Upon reboot, I login to the domain as root, and am greeted with my roaming profile and my /home/My Documents folder. After adding a small test text file and changing my background wallpaper, I logout, reboot and log in again as root. Everything is the same. The profile roamed and the files stayed. So I logout, and try to login with another account that I added (should be a machine trust account). Almost instantaneously, it informs me that my login can't be found or is incorrect. I've tried logging in from two other XP Professional machines, and was only able to log in as root.

Let me know which configuration files you need to see and I will post them.

I've googled around and searched this and other forums, but have not found a solution. If someone could give me a hint as to what I'm doing wrong, I'd be most appreciative. Thank you in advance.