Ad 1.) Yes, sorry. You are right. An updated package will be uploaded to netlabs as soon as it works again.
Ad 2.) Possibly the user account that you are using only has guest privilege and thus cannot connect. A proper setup of users AND groups might fix that. Please note, that using the LAN Requester with Samba server is (for several good reasons) not recommended, we do not even support it. That is not likely going to change, especially as the Samba Client is quite fast and very stable meanwhile, especially with the latest revisions of NetDrive (3.1.3) and EVFS (the one that ships with eCS 2.1).
However, nevertheless I am interested in your results and I'd gladly them add to the FAQ
http://svn.netlabs.org/samba#FAQFrequentlyAskedQuestionsandAnswers