A few things to think about
:
Firewall? You will have to add a trusted zone on your windows firewall, example: 192.168.1.xxx to 192.168.1.xxx or else the samba shares will not get though.
Workgroup name? You need to set the workgroup name of all your network machines to the same share name, examples "homelan" or "zoot".
From your windows machines, can you open a quasi-shell with 'cmd' and type "net view". Can you see your samba server through this? If you can't then you're being blocked somewhere.
From your linux machines, smbclient -L localhost will do the same thing.
Good luck! It really does work
