Changing Windows ‘hosts’ file in guest OS under Parallels Desktop 6

I have a few Xserves running as file servers in an Active Directory environment. The golden triangle approach has worked great for me: http://www.bombich.com/mactips/activedir.html. I set mine up following those directions exactly, and here's my experiences:

1. I do get a password expiration notification when I log in as an AD user. I would say pay special attention to the kerberos part of the Golden Triangle approach. The key most people miss is sudo dsconfigad -enableSSO.
2. I think the kerberos part above would also fix this. Works both ways for me.
3. What I've done a few times is use Boot Camp to create a physical Windows environment, join that to AD, then let them run it via VMware Fusion from OS X if they wish.
4. I have a Windows server, and feel your .DS_Store pain. However, this command helps: defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true
5. At the top window of Directory.app, you can select "People" to filter out the junk.

Active Directory provides the username and password, as well as some group memberships and user policies. AD only targets Windows users. I don't have admin rights on Active Directory. I have to get permission to join my Xserves to the domain. I have no ability to modify the AD schema at all. If I wanted to extend certain OS X specific policies to my Mac users, I can do so via my Open Directory master. The Bombich document explains how.

Hope that helps some!

What version of Windows are you running on the file server? 10.3 is pretty ancient and its version of Samba is even older. There could be any numbers of incompatibilities especially if you're keeping up on Windows patches.

Have you checked the VPN logs to see if the user isn't seeing a dropped connection during the times the error is encountered? Flaky connections often exhibit errors similar to what you're seeing.