I don't think root is the problem, as I mounted it manually as root and
root also don't have write access when it is mounted from fstab.
I still believe that root is the source of the issue. To the best of my knowledge, when the system is brought up, root will mount the necessary partitions that are in the fstab. Try this. Unmount the share that you want to have mounted. Su to root and remount it. If you had rw before, you don't have it now even if you specified it at mount time. So there is something about having root mount that share that is causing it. Now if you did not get the same results, then it might have been an issue on the two machines that I use here at the house. Here is what I get when I mount a share on my server to a mount point on my machine. As user my mount point directory has the following permissions. drwxr-xr-x with marshall as the owner and users as the group. Now as root mounting it. drwxr-xr-x with root being both owner and group. Here is where the permissions have changed. Now you do not have w permission anymore even though you logged into the share with the proper credentials!
I have also thought of writing an init script to do the mounting, if all else fails.
You basically only need to create a script that contain the smbmount command as you would enter it on command line. Then you place the script in /etc/init.d and use the runlevel editor to assign the script to runlevel 2,3,5. (I think those runlevels should be fine)
You should actually add the integration for 'start', 'stop' and 'restart' also. I will write a script later on when I have time, as I must still see what rc functions SuSE use and how they work.
But I would prefer to have it work the correct way - with fstab.
So would I. Could you see if you get the same results as me so I will know if it is my machines please? I have been trying to fight this silly issue for a while.