I wanted to confirm that the Samba version was causing the issue. My NAS
came installed with an early version of the Samba v3 series which was
released in 2005 (I did not write down the exact build number unfortunately
and have no desire to reset back to factory to find it).
This is somewhat surprising as a lot of NAS devices shipped with Samba v2
which is even older.
Regardless, after much effort and learning on my part I unlocked/hacked the
OS on the NAS and installed Samba
3.2.3 (the latest stable build, released
august 2008).
Suffice it to say that the errors have disappeared!
On another note, while the blog was very helpful, MS should really create a
KB article for this issue and link it to the error message in ON.
Just my two cents.