I have a client whose infrastructure is Windows based. The company is a printshop so they have a mix of Macs and PCs on the client side. The problem is that if they use Samba to store their Mac Illustrator, Photoshop and Quark files on the Windows Servers those files lose their resource forks and become unusable (at least that's what they claim). I told them to use Apple File Protocol instead but now they're having issues with the Windows servers dropping connections. It turns out that the version of AFP that Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 come with is 2.xx. The version bundled into OS-X is 3.1. I would imagine that that's the cause of the problems.
The differences between v. 2.1 or 2.2 (depending on who you talk to) and the present 3.1 release from Apple are great. While AFP is supposed to be backwards compliant, SFM may or may not be 100% what Apple engineered as AFP. Services for Macintosh also have security level limitations, supporting clear text passwords unless you add in the MS UAM, no support for long file names, no auto-reconnect features and are just flat out poorly implemented by the standards of modern day AFP clients.
Their best option? What I did! Migrate the user data to an Xserve. The connection speeds were 3x as fast, we don't drop connections and there's no data corruption. You can even kerberize the AFP server in OS X to work with an existing Active Directory, which means you can keep your single LDAP records and password policies, but also vastly improve security and provide a true sso environment for your users.
