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The other problem he doesn't like is that at the moment if someone plugs a laptop into a network port, it gets assigned an IP by DHCP (thats ok) but then it will be able to do a \\server and bring up all the file shares and get into some of them without logging in at all - will samba make it so file shares will only appear when a user logs in?

The reason that this is happening is *because* you have share permissions set to "Everyone". Change them to "Domain Users" instead of "Everyone" and this will resolve the problem - since your server will then require an authenticated account for access to those shares. It won't however solve the issue of poor security due to badly configured permissions in the first place. The only way to fix this is the hard way - which you will still have to do if you use samba or upgrade to Win2K. Personally I'd save some money and a lot of hassle and fix the problem that you have, which isn't really that hard. Chris L