Problem with SMB shares

OS X 10.4.2.

I have a Samba fileserver at home. It works great, but when I bring my laptop to work and the share is unavailable, bad things happen to my apps. The problem seems to happen in the following circumstances:

1. An app has an "Open recent.." or similar menu, and one of the recently opened items was on my Samba fileserver
2. An app remembers the path of the last file that was opened, and that file was on the fileserver.

In these cases, when I try to use the Open dialog or the recent items list, the app locks up forever until I kill it. The system.log shows the following errors repeatedly:

Aug 19 11:08:09 lisa automount[15795]: Attempt to mount /automount/Servers/homer/root returned 50 (Network is down)
Aug 19 11:08:09 lisa automount[168]: Can't mount homer:/root on /private/Network/Servers/homer/root: Network is down (50)

Clearly, the OS doesn't deal well with unavailable shares. It should just try once (or three times, or whatever) instead of going into an endless loop. This problem has existed for me since Panther, and it's bugging the crap out of me. Does anyone else ever see this, or have any idea how to work around it, other than never using the Open dialog or Open Recent menu?

 

I'm accessing them by hostname. In the error message above, "homer" is the file server (Linux box) and "lisa" is the client (Powerbook running 10.4.2.)

 

Yeah, the thing is, I don't really want it to connect when I'm at work. Exposing SMB to the Internet isn't a sane thing to do. The IP of the host isn't an Internet-routable IP anyway (it's 192.168.1.x). What I want it to do is do what every other OS (even *Windows*) does when a network mount isn't available, which is fail, and tell the application it's not available. Instead, the app freezes forever.

 

Not sure whatcha mean... Usually, I unmount them before I leave my home network, but sometimes I don't, and when the laptop wakes up, it's smart enough to recognize that the share is gone, and it'll pop up a small dialog box with a single "Disconnect" button. This doesn't affect my problem, though. As soon as I use XCode, VLC, and some other apps which either remember the last path used or have a Recent Items menu, the app locks up indefinitely.

Interestingly, I filed a bug with Apple thinking it was XCode-specific behavior, before I saw it in other apps. It's been sitting in "Open" status for many months, which is how all of my Apple bugs seem to end up, no matter how much information I put in them.