You beat me to it!
My fileserver happens to be running Debian Lenny. I’m gathering this has something to do with UTF-8 support but I don’t know what. This worked in one of two ways:
1. With Samba 3.2.5 (which is Debian Lenny’s included package) and WiiMC v1.04. There is still some instability with Samba shares that have directories with alot of files/directories, it just seems to cause the whole system to crash.
Also USB media doesn’t work in this version well at all.
2. With Samba 3.4.8 (which is from Debian Lenny’s backports repository) and WiiMC 1.09+. This has pretty good stability for large directories, and of course USB media works well in this release.
To enable backports you need to do the following