Windows 7 and samba network sharing

I spent a number of hours googling for an answer to this problem, so now that I've finally figured it out, I'll post some details.

I have an ubuntu linux server which has a raid5 for storage of photos I've taken, documents, and various other junk. Some of the shares are public read-only so that my photos/documents don't accidently get deleted while others are password protected with read/write access. In windows XP the whole setup was working great, but when I installed Windows7 I was able to access public shares, but not the passworded ones. Finally I found a reference to "Credential Manager" (some newfangled password manager) in which I found that Windows7 was storing my user name as Computer\user (C2D\shunter). As soon as I deleted the "Computer\" part, the shares all started working perfectly. Weird....