After a nights rest (and a successful solution to my NT authorization problems) and short apology is in order to the list. My attitude in the last message was less than helpful and I apologize. On a helpful note here is what I learned: Regardless of the interpretation of any of the samba documentation Samba-1.9.18 and later versions fully support DES encryption for WindowsNT without *ANY* changes to the Makefiles or other configuration. After building v1.9.18p3 all you have to do is add: encrypt passwords = Yes in your smb.conf file and encryption will work. Contrary to early samba version (<=1.9.17) you do *NOT* need libdes to get encryption working with versions later than 1.9.18. So why was I having problems (and possibly why you are having problems)? The samba rpm package that ships with RedHat v5.0 is version 1.9.17 if you have this installed then it will not support DES encryption. So you say? obtain and install v1.9.18p3... As I did; *but* the samba rpm package from Redhat-5.0 may have installed the smbd and nmbd binaries in /usr/sbin/ while you may have installed them in /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin or some other directory. The result of this is that when you start and stop samba services via /etc/rc.d/init.d/smb you might actually be starting and stopping the old version and not the correct one that you just compiled and installed. its a silly error I know but its easily overlooked and could be frustrating and difficult to track down. At least it was for me. RedHat users: Don't use the redhat samba rpm as supplied from redhat. The 1.9.18 version appears to be much better and from reeading the docs seems to have a lot better performance and abilities. (Good work Samba demigods!!) You can pick up excellent v1.9.18p3 rpm packages for RedHat-5.0 systems from ftp://samba.anu.edu.au/pub/samba/Binary_Packages/redhat/RPMS/5.0/... (packages for older RedHat versions are also availale along those lines). Or you can solve your encryption problem like I did... Carefully remove any binaries/log/configuration files from any previous samba installation and then follow the samba-1.9.18p3 directions to install a new, clean installation. So once again, I apologize for the bad attitude and frustration in the last message and I hope that this one is more helpful and can prevent others from enduring the same fate. Other than that a big kudos to the samba team for adding the DES encryption support as a native ability to samba as I feel this gives samba the feel of a more complete, robust, professional and commercial package. (Unless you don't trust commercial stuff, in which case ignore that particular adjective. ;-) Thanks for everyone's help and patience, especially John for being so informative in spite of it all and for maintaining the rpm packages on samba.anu.edu.au. - Jeff