I ran /sbin/vlsmbmnt as a regular user in a terminal. It worked fine. Then, I thought, now I'll try running it from the menu. And it worked just fine. I don't know why it started working, but now it does work from the menu.
Just to clarify - vlsmbmnt won't work if the name of the directory on the foreign machine has a space in it - Is that correct?
Then, I made all the changes you advised in the smb.conf file. At the end of it all, everything worked great.
Thank you very much for all the help, you deserve a day off. Actually walking through this has helped me understand it better. (And I now understand that smbpasswd must mean the user name and password needed to access the host machine.)
One more question - Why the wait of seven minutes? What is taking place, and why does it take so long?
Thanks very much again.
(bigpaw - I actually did read through that document, I just didn't mentally connect it with that name when you first mentioned it.)