Comment 16 for bug 24184

I believe you will find that this bug is now resolved in hardy. :) If you install the samba server task, or if you use nautilus-share to manage shares, the libpam-smbpass package will automatically be pulled in, causing passwords to be synchronized between the system and Samba password stores from that point on.

This is not installed by default because NTLM password hashes are weaker than standard md5 passwords on disk, and because the Ubuntu policy is to not listen on any ports by default; but if you choose to configure filesharing, it should now be pretty seamless going forward.