Any idea why I can type

smb://summer/Movies%20(G)

in a nautilus window url bar and correctly see my Windows share "Movies" on a G: drive

however

if I use the Go->Network from the nautilus toolbar, then the share does not appear, just an Icon saying "windows network" which when clicked , does nothing.

When you put the address in like that, you are directly connecting to that host. When you go through the network browser, it is attempting to browse all machines on the workgroup. It could be that you have not configured your workgroup (the Windows and Linux machines might not even be in the same workgroup) which would obviously cause browsing to fail. There could be a DNS/NetBIOS failure as well, which is delaying or preventing browsing from working. This could result from a misconfiguration in Samba's master browser options, which determines which computers on the network handle Windows name resolution.

I would check the workgroup first, as that is the most likely cause. If that fails, you will need to do some more troubleshooting to diagnose which aspect of the system is causing the problem.

Thanks for the pointer.

The XP machine (windows share) is on a "MSHOME" workgroup.

How do I discover the Ubuntu PC workgroup name please? And if different, how do I reset it. I cannot see any of this under Ubuntu's system->network or System->NetworkTools menu off the desktop.

I am not sure how you would change it through GNOME itself, as I don't use it personally.

But if you open the Samba configuration file at /etc/samba/smb.conf, you should see a line near the top that says "workgroup =". Change whatever is after this to "MSHOME", and restart Samba (or the machine itself).

Ah, I see, the workgroup is in the smb.conf file.

Okay, the tool in gnome is gnome-control-center app, under the SharedFolders icon. SMB is installable/modifyable here.

I've changed this now and it works.

Thanks very much.