About three years ago I set up a Dell server for a graphic design/signprinting company using SME 5.5 w/software RAID in server-only mode. All was well until they started moving to Windows XP; certain specialized apps did not like pulling files from the SME Server and file access from XP seemed sluggish relative to 98.
So this weekend I figured I'd upgrade the machine to 6.01-01 (can't wait any longer for 6.5 or 7.0 for this project, sadly). Knowing from experience that going from 5.5 directly to 6.01 can introduce problems, I had my old 5.6 CD handy.
EVERY time the upgrade failed at "Error installing net-tools-1.60". Two different CD drives and a quick download of the ISO & new CD didn't help, nor did trying a jump directly to 6.01.
So, having the time and knowing there was a full mirror of the server's contents (thanks to XXCOPY) on a workstation, I used the Lazy Admin tools (thanks Michiel Blotwijk), wiped the machine & installed 6.01-01 from scratch. I then updated Samba to version 3.0.7 (thanks Greg Zartman, I know it's still beta but it works great so far) and installed the Advanced Workgroup contrib (thanks jprice) in case I needed to fiddle with oplocks.
This setup fixed all the XP issues encountered thus far, and two users commented that file access seemed noticeably quicker.
So ... a small success story and another big win for SME!