Win 7 Home - unable to connect to samba server

I am currently installing a Win 7 box. When I first set things up I was able to get onto my Linux server in Network -> [server name], by logging in to Win 7 using the same user name and password set up on the Linux box.

A short while later I am unable to connect - I get a dialog prompting me to enter a user name and password and a message "Logon failure: unknown user name or bad password". If I re-enter my user name and password the dialog comes back again.

I had a similar problem with a win 7 box about a year, but I've never had problems with XP.

Any clues out there?

I've fixed this by putting the following in \Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts:

192.168.2.40 myserver


.. where myserver is the name of my samba server.

I've had to do this on all my win7 and one vista machine.

Why should this be necessary?