I recently tried out Kubuntu and decided that I liked GNOME better. However, KDE had a different way of going about its network management. It had a screen where I entered a default user name and password. From there, I could browse into my Windows computer as if I were actually at the computer itself. In GNOME, I can see my computer in the Network view, but when I try to browse into it, I get an empty window. Yet my roommate is using the same Windows OS that my Windows machine uses (Vista) and I can still see all of his directories even using GNOME. Why is it that GNOME displays a blank window? Is there a way I can set it to log in with a specified user name and password so that I can browse into my Windows desktop? (This is on the Ubuntu forums too, but no luck there yet.)

I don't use Gnome but if I remember correctly you go to 'Places' -> 'Connect to servers' (or maybe just 'Servers'), then choose 'Windows share' and input your user name and password.

That didn't work when I tried it. Somehow, the name of the server wasn't right even though I typed it exactly the same.