Connecting to Windows Server via IP Address

I've been asking this question on every Mac forum I frequent, and haven't come up with anything yet, but I don't think I've tried the bright crowd here yet (if I already did, sorry!).

Just about every place where people are discussing Panther has a lot of talk about problems getting Panther to properly browse Windows networks. Network browsing feels a little funky, but I'm actually getting that to work just fine. Ironically, the one thing everybody else seems to be able to do is the one thing I can't: Connect to a Windows server directly using an IP address.

I'm trying to access a Windows share (running on a WinNT4 server box) that's not on my local network (so browsing or using its computer name isn't an option) by entering it's IP address (smb://###.###.###.###/SHARENAME). In Jaguar, not only would this fail, but I could reproduceably cause a Kernel Panic by trying twice in a row on more than one computer--definitely a bug of some sort (which I reported to Apple).

Panther doesn't crash, at least, but it sits at the "Connecting" dialogue for about two minutes, then coughs up the error "The Finder cannot complete the operation because some data in [...] could not be read or written."

Connecting works just fine on a nearby Mac using OS9 and DAVE 2.x, and I just tried installing the Dave 4.1.1 trial, which immediately allowed me to connect to that share (didn't even have to restart). Remove DAVE, and it works no more. More mystifying still, I can even log in and access the files on it using the terminal command "smbclient". (Speaking of which, why doesn't smbmount work any more? didn't that work in Jaguar?)

So I know the Windows server is working, I know I can connect to it using tools installed by Panther, I know I can connect to it using the Connect To Server dialogue with a 3rd party tool installed, but I just can't get it to work out of the box.

There's obviously something funky with my network situation causing this, but I can't for the life of me figure out what it is; I'm on a large campus network, trying to connect to a computer at another, smaller location with nothing but the Internet in between the two.

Any folks with network experience have any suggestions?

Yes, those are supposed to be forward slashes. According the Apple's help, there are two possible formats:

smb://DNSname/sharename

and

\\DNSname\sharename

The top one does indeed fail completely if you try to use backslashes, and works on other computers with forward ones. Apple's help also implies that the latter version with the backslashes is only for DNS names and not IP addresses, which seems to be true--it coughs up an error much faster, although actually I've never gotten the backslash version to work with anything at all.

Guess I'm alone with this problem.