My Linux box does not have anything that would impeed authentication (no firewall nor virus protection) and is still experiencing the same problem. All the machines on the network, regardless of their anti-virus/firewall status, have the same problem.
Other boxes, Windows or Linux/Samba, do not exhibit authentication issues with shares.
Guess I could try putting it back to factory defaults after I take the 78 gig of data off and put it on the old samba box. . . .
Too bad the web interface doesn't show the output of a smbstatus command.