> > With that said, the Samba options discussed are part of
> the Slackware 3.5.10. Therefore I presume 
> >those options were part of the upstream KDE repository.
> If those options are not available in a particular 
> >distro's 3.5.10, then I presume the options were
> stripped from the upstream KDE sources.
> 
> The patches applied by Gentoo to the stock 3.5.10 are in
> plain view ( kdebase-3.5-patchset-13.tar.bz2 
> should still be retrievable from the file repositories);
> none of the four kcontrol patches appears to
> strip a panel. I am now 99% certain that this panel is
> supplied by smb4k, rather than kcontrol itself.

I don't know what smb4k is. :) There is no such package in Slackware. As I use both KDE3 and Trinity in Slackware 13.1, which does not support either in any way, and I have the Samba related options available in both KControls, I am left to believe the Samba KCOntrol options are part of KDE3/Trinity.

Possibly those who are not seeing those options in KDE3/Trinity KControl don't have some respective build options enabled? The tdebase build options includes an explicit -DWITH_SAMBA option, which defaults to OFF. I don't know how that build option affects KControl.

Darrell