OK, this has me stumped. My long standing Ubuntu file server running Samba exposes 4 main shares to my network, and they are visible AND can be deeply browsed by my Windows 7 and Windows 8 machines, my Android devices using ES File Explorer. This has been true for years.

I just installed XUbuntu on an Acer Aspire One and Thunar shows me those 4 shares but whichever I click on it says "Failed to Open" and "Permission Denied".

I tried using smbclient on my netbook and after entering the password I can cd to each of the shares and then descend the directory structures.

So it seems like just a Thunar issue. I have seen a lot on Google about gvfs, and I have a lot of gvfs components installed straight out of the netbook's install of XUbuntu. gvfs-smb is not, but I gather that is not relevant for Debian based distros.

I don't think posting a lot of config files would help here, because the whole network can see these shares. I think there is something I just don't know about my netbook, or XUbuntu 14.04, or something...otherwise why would smbclient work? I think the problem is me. But I can post replies with any detail that helpful folks may request.

Sorry to answer my own question, but while waiting to see what others might suggest, I found in my Googling a site suggesting mounting Samba shares on *nix machines. The mount syntax they suggested didn't work, but eventually I found the missing component that mount needed to work. So here's the workaround:
- install "smb4k"
- for each of the four samba shares I created mount points
sudo mkdir /mnt/share1
sudo mkdir /mnt/share2
etc.
- for each of the four samba shares I mounted them at those mount points (it will ask for user password)
sudo mount -t cifs -o user=myuserid //192.168.1.xx/share1 /mnt/share1
sudo mount -t cifs -o user=myuserid //192.168.1.xx/share2 /mnt/share2
etc.

I imagine I should be able to adapt this to fstab but it's late right now where I am.