i seem to be getting those two errors on my windows 7 sp1 machine that is vpn in on network where my linux server is.

when i'm on the local network of the linux server within that network firewall, i have no problems from any windows 7 pc. at most if the server is loaded then the window into the samba share will take 2-3 seconds before showing the contents of the folder.

from my win7 machine outside the network that i vpn in to,
the initial connection to my linux server via \\ip_address brings up the samba folder shares /data and /scratch quickly without problem. however when i go into /data that's where things fail quickly. upon first try i can usually get 1 to 2 folders deep and maybe drag a 1mb word doc to my desktop. but if i then click back and try to go up and over a folder within the /data share that's when my window fails and i get one of those two errors in the subject. once i get the error, it seems like the entire samba share is nuked on me until i do an /etc/init.d/smb restart on the server.
oh, and i can have a putty ssh going into the same server with zero problem the entire time.
just prior to this posting, i had large lengthy data copies happening from a win7 computer on the local network to the server so i would not be surprised if there was some performance hit and a delay accessing samba from outside the network via a vpn. but the eventual failure and semaphore error is unacceptable, any ideas?
the entire problem seems to be all with samba and my win7 pc outside the network, it is my win7 pc which is clean and stable.

so i sort of confirmed yesterday that is most likely had nothing to do with my firewall on my windows7 pc that was vpn'd in.
my large data copy via samba finished on the server, I have since done this on the server:
/etc/init.d/smb stop
/etc/init.d/nmb stop
net cache flush
rm -r /var/lib/samba/*.tdb
rm -r /var/lib/samba/*.ldb {no files of this kind were there}
/etc/init.d/smb start
/etc/init.d/nmb start

before the above when doing a smb and nmb restart, smbstatus would still show a lot of files locked and a lot of PID's and Services.
after doing the above it cleared all that out and smbstatus shows clean except for 3 users i can verify.
will see if that helps later today.