I had to read your post 5 times Gil,

After which, I went to my partition that has a stock slackware 10.2 install, full noobie..2.4.31 kernel.

I then threw in a network card, linksys lne100tx (as 2.4.31 does not work with either on-board network cards on asus nforce 2 motherboard)

Rebooted, then ran slapt-get on the primary mirror.

Copied over my samba's conf file...from my daily slackware partition. Threw it into /etc/samba folder.

Rebooted....and boom...dropping packets like mad to a different patched slackware box 10.2 that's fully updated and running 2.6.15.3 kernel.

So I dumped the 2.6.15.3 kernel, and restored via powerquest drive image to stock 2.4.31 on that boxen, and copied over the samba.conf rebooted...

and dropping packets to the other one.

Rebooted my switches and hubs, routers, dsl modem.

Changed wires last night so I know their good.

Even though I know that SUSE and Mepis talks to both slackware boxes and drops packets when slackware is updated and does not when they are 2.4.31 kernels.

The heck with it...I'm just gonna use NFS..and and external hard drive if I gotta move stuff.

Apparently I'm the only one with this issue on slackware 10.2, so I give...

Well, good to hear he is aware of it at least. Though it still doesn't make any sense. Unless he is intending on Samba to depend on dmapi in Slackware 11, why not recompile it for -current like he did for the previous versions?

Personally, I think the problem was the very deceptive tag line for the email:

You would just assume they were all for the same thing.

I FIXED IT!!!!!!!!!!!!

my smb.conf had this and worked fine before Pat's patch:

server signing = Auto

I changed it to "no" and now I work!

Thank you developers for the 'kompare' program...I figured it out in under 2 minutes flat.