Well, I tried that advice and didn't get anywhere. I confirmed that the problem was present in the new account. This confirms that the problem is system level. Okay, so what do I do about that. Still don't know what the problem is or how to fix it. I run 'disk utility', repaired some...
I found my problem. I had two firewalls active on my PC. The Windows firewall of course was allowing the share volumes to be accessed but my McCaffey firewall was not. When I allowed access from my Powerbook IP address everything suddenly worked fine. Go figure.
I have the same basic problem. After turning on windows file sharing and adding my powerbook as a network place on my PC, I can see and copy file from my Mac public folder. However, when I try to connect to the PC from the Mac (using smb://192.XXX.X.X/PhotoVault/) the Mac cannot locate the PC...