OK. Here's my question.

I'm trying to connect to a Windows XP share (on a XP Home box). I know that the firewall is blocking any probes on the SMB ports. Windows clients can connect to this machine, presumably because they aren't relying on a probe to see if it's active. Is there a way to get around this other than by disabling the firewall, or opening up these ports?

Thanks.

Make sure that the network file sharing protocol is installed. That may be why those ports were not opened. If that doesn't open these ports then open them in the windows firewall.
Look in the network device configuration.

I know it's fire firewall: file sharing has (and does) work among Windows boxes.

On the Windows box in question, I opened up connections on the lan on the firewall, and it indeed did enable communication to the machine from a linux box, but Windows machines don't have this limitation.

What does nmap show from the Linux box and targeting the windows XP box. What does "net show" say? I don't know what kind of probes you are talking about. If a connection attempt is refused then that port isn't open. Your title said that the Windows box has firewalled off these ports. If the windows telnet client allows you to connect to another port, you could use that to test if a port is open.
Also, make sure you don't use a domain on your Linux server because that won't with XP home edition.

Maybe "probes" was not the correct word.

I did already try nmap with and without the firewall on.

When the firewall was enabled, all ports were listed as filtered (I had to run nmap with the -P0 switch, however).

When the firewall was disabled, the ports that are necessary for samba (137, 139, and 445) were open. It said that all of the other ports were closed.

As far as telnet goes, I know that if it weren't for the firewall, the ports are open. I'll have to test telnet with the firewall up to see if the connection is refused still, but the output from smbtree suggests that it will be.

I do have it working with a stop-gap solution: I configured the firewall to allow any communication from the network subnet.

My other question is how could other windows machines not have this problem, but my linux box requires the computer to be wide open in order to communicate via SMB/Samba

Thanks.

Different Windows versions use different ports. Originally ports 137-139 were used. NT introduces WINS to reduce the number of broadcasts. XP might just use be using port 445. There is documentation on this in the chapter on browsing in the "Samba 3 HOWTO & Reference Guide". Look for a samba-doc package, or check in /usr/share/samba-<version> or /usr/share/packages/samba/. You can also download from the Samba website.

If the windows machine is Vista, you may need to upgrade your version of Samba.

After the Commerce Dept's case against Microsoft was settled, the higher ups sent down a memo to the smb2 programming team that it was "all clear to f*#@ with Samba". They even published phony documentation on how their acls work. When that came to light, it made the European courts very unhappy.