Thanks to Lars for his response and to Michael Gueterman for some
valuable pointers.

It appears that protocol negoitiations between Samba and a Windows for
Workgroups client result in the selection of the LM1.X2002 protocol.

Using this protocol, attempts to access MPE fixed length ASCII records
result in the smbd server on the 3000 entering a loop.

As Lars points out...
> The cause seems to be that "reported" file size (i.e. EOF times recsize)
> does not match "perceived" file size (when reading thru bytestream
> emulation which removes trailing blanks from records and "fakes" LF
> delimiters).

FWIW, I reckon that bytestream emulation should preserve data integrity,
ie not strip the trailing spaces.

With a Windows NT 3.51 client the NT LM 0.12 protocol is selected and
FA can be accessed (albeit without the trailing spaces).  I believe
Michael can also vouch for Windows 95.

So I guess the bottom line is...
Beware of accessing fixed length MPE records with trailing spaces from
a WfW client (and if you do so *successfully* please let me know how).

Sam Calvert