At a school I work for we have the School Administration software (Wauton Samuel) running on a Windows XP pro machine. Originally this was shared with mapped drives with just the office staff (2 users) and was not a problem. An automated register system was installed which over time has pushed the minimum number of required connections to 14. This also assumes that unneeded connections get dropped which they seldom do but that's a different issue.

To attempt to workaround this without moving the entire shared folder to a Windows Server (which I know would involve a lot of pain) I used this workaround:-

A) Mount the share using Samba on Linux.

B) Share the mounted Share back out from the Linux machine.

To do this I did the following:-

1) Create a user account for the linux server on the Windows Machine and give it a password.

2) Create a new mount point on the linux server:-

mkdir /mnt/newshare

3) In /etc/fstab on the the linux machine add a line like

//windowsmachine/existingshare      /mnt/newshare             cifs    username=newuser,password=passwordfornewuser 0 0

4) Edit /etc/samba/smb.conf and share the new mount point.

[newshare$]
 comment= This a reshared folder
 path = /mnt/newshare
 public = yes
 writable = yes
 browseable = yes
 valid users = @Staff , root, "@AdminStaff", @Administrators

Notes:-

The dollar-sign on the end of newshare$ is added because I want the share to be hidden on the network.

My valid users list is authenticated against the main Domain Controllers active directory using winbind etc. The @items are usergroups.

The password is visbile to other linux users in the fstab. This can be got around by doing something like this.