OSX 10.6 connection issues to Windows 7 server

This is my first post on this forum and I hope you guys can help. I currently have 2 OSX 10.6 machines on the network trying to connect to a Windows 7 server. I have all the sharing permissions on the windows box correct because it works half the time (described later). I can ping the windows box successfully and the Windows box can ping both mac machines. I am using smb//:IPAddress/ShareName to connect to the windows machine but I keep returning a generic error saying something like "Cannot connect....Check IP address...".

The strange thing is that I can connect to the windows server AFTER I do a restart. It works flawlessly after that for a while. All I know is the next day I come in and i get the error when trying to connect to the server. The server doesn't go to sleep or put the hard disks to sleep over night. The server stays on along with the Mac computers. It seems that a restart of the server resets something that allows the connection to be made.

I checked in my router settings but there is nothing in there that throws up a red flag to me. The server is assigned a fixed IP address.

Any ideas? I have googled and tried most everything but I haven't found another issue quite like mine.

Anybody?

Are you running Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008?

Well, try Connecting OSX to Windows 7 - Microsoft Search either way.

Windows 7 Pro.

I would still check the link I posted above. There is a lot more information than I could go over in a single post and I really don't want to rewrite what is already there, from the horse's mouth, so to speak..