If you, like myself, have encountered an issue with your SAMBA / LINUX (Centos 5.2 in my case) setup and have tried everything short of re-installing MS Server then please read on as this might just save your sanity.

SAMBA has been setup correctly according to countless articles, sample configuration files and many helpful tips that one finds on the internet. However, even though I can see my shared folders and I can navigate through my root home directory (provided you are logged in as root) allowing me permission to read and write to my home directory, I still cannot get into any of my other shares regardless of setting the permissions to 777 on the shared folders.

As one would of thought (well, at least myself) the problem would lie in my SAMBA setup, Alas, this was not to be the case. The problem was caused by SELinux (Security Enhanced Linux) which is a Linux feature that provides a variety of security policies. As my Linux server is a development machine which has no connection to the outside world, the quick solution to my issue was to set the enforcing of selinux policies to off (0), which as you can imagine solved my problem immediately.
Run the following shell command to disable enforcing.

# setenforce 0 (to turn it back on setenforce 1)

As I mentioned, this is a development server and thus I am not worried about disabling any security features. If you are having issues with live servers I would suggest reading up on SELinux, especially for SAMBA - http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SELinux/samba

I hope this tip is helpful to you as it would of been to me?