Snow Leopard conflict while using a PC Server

I work for a small design team within a larger communications company, the design team are on Macs (7) the rest of the company are on PCs (40) and we all work off one central server which unfortunately happens to be a PC server.

Apart from the annoying messages that I live with everyday due to file names being too long etc etc. I've now discovered that since I've upgraded to Snow Leopard I'm now unable to do a search on our server, everytime I try it freezes and sometimes crashes my machine and all the other Macs along with it.

This is very annoying as I use search all the time, searching on my Mac isn't an issue but all our work is stored on this PC server.

Another weird thing that happens is whenever I delete a file off the server my window columns jump back to the opening window column. This is very annoying when deleting and rearranging files as I have to then go back through all the files again, it also gives me a fright thinking that I've deleted all the work on the server!

Our IT guys said there is nothing that can be done, the new windows operating system and Snow just don't get along. Why can't Macs and PCs get their act together and stop all these incompatibility issues it makes my working day ****, not all Mac users work exclusively with other Mac users!

Does anyone else use Macs with a PC server, if so have you noticed any problems and is there anyway to work this out?

Cheers