FWIW, it took just a few minutes to compile 2.6.7.rc3 from Korg on a client with no 4k stacks. Reboot; A few minutes to add the Nvidia and Madwifi drivers, edit xorg.conf, reboot and everything works. Apparently, the Samba/CIFS issues relate to the client. Using 32k r/w sizes to a CIFS server "root" mount and the throughput is outstanding. The 2.6 series are far simpler to custom compile than the 2.4 kernels.
