Mac/Windows Networking Dilemmas

I've been using a Mac PowerBook now for about 6 months. I love most things about it. The one thing that consistently frustrates me, however, is the ability to integrate stand-alone Macs into Windows networks. And, as one might expect, Microsoft and Apple point the finger at one another saying the other is to blame. I've had various levels of success getting my Mac to talk to a Windows Active Directory. Printing works great, domain login works great, resource enumeration works great (most of the time), but that's where it turns ugly. Accessing Windows file shares is essentially a hit or miss proposition. If you've got administrative access to the network and you're able to map an administrative share to a server (C$ on a remote resource, for example) this will generally work well. But....how many of your users have administrative access? The answer to that should be a VERY low number. Accessing conventional Windows shares is problematic. I can generally map the share, view volume contents, and even open files to which I have access. The problem comes when you try to save or copy files to the share. I've seen at least a half dozen strange and inconsistent error messages that all end with the same result.....a 0KB file "ghost" on the share. I've literally spent about 12 hours in total researching and attempting to employ various fixes to the problem with mixed results. Today, I downloaded a product from Thursby software called "DAVE". It has promise. It immediately fixed some of the major problems I was having with file transfers and saving to shares, but it seems to have broken some networking functionality that was working. I'm going to continue to evaluate this product and I'll let you know how it goes.