samba - Feb 2004 - machine account with strange behaviour

I'm running samba-3.0.1-2 on a redhat machine. it acts as a pdc
for our domain. clients are w2k machines. 

when administering the w2k boxes via the mmc one of the machine
accounts shows up in the domain users list. it is shown together
with it's ending "$". I removed the machine from the domain and
added it back however the effect stays.

Additionally it is *sometimes* not possible to map drives to shares
on that machine. Users receive a message that "no error message was
found" or sometimes that an "unknown internal windows 2000 error"
has
occured.

The machine account was created manually just the same way all the
others were made. It's line in /etc/passwd is completely unsuspicous.

Any help would be appreciated!

best regards, Oliver