samba share setup on linux clients

[jbk-SkCWf5sxpj0sV2N9l4h3zg at public.gmane.org (jbk)]

I have a samba server and a new linux client that the 5 
members of the family will use. Prior to this the client was 
a win2000 machine with the shares defined per user as mapped 
drives. I would like to create a similar functionality on 
the new linux setup.
What I want to achieve is to have these shares mapped when 
they login so that when they open applications that store 
data on the server the application finds the data.
The server has shares defined per user and per users who are 
members of certain groups.
I use the gnome desktop on the client. In the nautilus 
browser I can see the shares that are browseable and visit 
them. I can mount the user shares by smb://server/sharename 
and entering the password when asked. The user share mapping 
established this way sometimes persists from session to 
session, but I don't know if it will be dependable or 
recognized by applications. I have been looking at the 
gconf-editor to see if I could define the shares there but I 
have not as of yet figured it out.

I would like to avoid setting up mount points in fstab. Is 
there a tutorial on line to show how to setup what I want?

Jim KR