Yes, I can ping the server by name
and no dropped packets.
I see Samba has a 3.0 beta 3 version available, I may try installing that.

You might want to give emence's idea a try before installing a beta app, it makes sense. The $ might be giving the mount command problems or like he said the signals might be getting messed up.

I totally missed emence's post . ??
anyway I tried the slash after the $ and got an Invalid share name error
the sleep 1 didn't fix it either.
patience is not one of my strong points!
I have everything running off my RH8 box and I have this fresh download of FreeBSD 5.1. I think this box is about to get it's thought pattern changed. I still have the other RH9 box running so if there are any more ideas I will gladly try them.
Thanks for all the effort!

These kind of things are why I went to Slackware. I got tired of all the gliches that RH and MD have. I installed Slackware on 3 PC's and have not had a problem other than PHP working right with Apache. I just installed Apache and PHP from source and Slack works like a top.