Yeah, I used
slapt-get and I noticed some anomalous behaviour from
mount.cifs. The
mount.smbfs file
is there and I can open it and scroll to the bottom: line 115 tries to
exec /sbin/mount.cifs
When I tried to open
mount.cifs that appears in the directory listing Leafpad tells me the file doesn't exist. Not put off yet I tried to open the file with vi...but I got the same result and that is off putting.

Manual install it is then. (Once again thanks for your persistence).

sudo installpkg samba-3.5.3-i586-1vl60.tlz
.-----.-----------------------------------------------------------------------.
| 1/1 | Installing samba-3.5.3-i586-1vl60.tlz |
'-----'-----------------------------------------------------------------------'
ERROR: Package is corrupt: samba-3.5.3-i586-1vl60.tlz
Deep joy.

(Downloaded three times so it
probably didn't corrupt in transit.)
Went back to the CLI and reinstalled samba.
I'm was starting to lose some faith with the distro now to be honest:
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on //192.168.1.10/spaceman,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error
(for several filesystems (e.g. nfs, cifs) you might
need a /sbin/mount.<type> helper program)
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so
and dmesg | tail seemed to confirm the worst:
[29690.972488] fs/cifs/cifsfs.c: Devname: //192.168.1.10/Other flags: 0
[29690.972516] CIFS VFS: No username specified
These errors result after adding shares into
/etc/fstab and submitting
sudo mount -a at the command line. Here is the line in /etc/fstab:
//192.168.1.10/share /mnt/share cifs credentials=/root/.smbcredentials,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777 0 0
...of course
/root/.smbcredentials contains my credentials for the server.
I also tried entering the credentials directly into fstab.
Finally I have a drive mapped! Problem is with the credentials file then,
as well as using temporary mounts...progress anyway. That will do for me, I have a network share mapped.
Thanks Nightflier...I hope others find this valuable.
