Hi again,
Basically, Microsoft does as bad a job with filesharing as it does with most other things. Windows filesharing is overcomplicated, slow, and prone to idiotic glitches. NFS is faster and much more straightforward, but can perform dismally on slow networks nonetheless, because it's missing some common-sense random access tricks. If you're only using Macs & Linux on your LAN, you might want to consider Apple's filesharing protocol. Samba's only advantage is its wide recognition.
Can anyone tell me how to set OSX to auto login to a Samba server at startup
I seem to have misinterpreted your initial question ... I took this to mean that you were running a samba PDC that you needed to log into at startup. It looks as though you don't want to log into the server at all, but just auto-mount a few shares at startup. Oops! Having fileshares mount automatically for you in OSX is fairly trivial, but you'll find that Windoze fileshares will fail to automatically reconnect after you wake your machine up from sleep. NFS or AFP are definitely far better choices for you :-)
One other consideration is file management. Both of your underlying operating systems support all kinds of nice things like permissions management and fairly unrestricted filenames. As a simple example, using samba would mean that you could be prevented from copying a file called ".#$$ C:", simply because it would upset Windows. There would also be tons of unnecessary ownership/permissions mapping going on that has the potential to cause all kinds of pointless headaches.
The easiest way is to simply place an alias of the server volume in your login items.
Mike's suggestion will work perfectly, provided your computer isn't a laptop that might periodically find itself outside your own LAN. A slightly more robust solution would be to write a quick applescript to detect your location before mounting your shares.