Best Samba how-to I’ve ever seen:

http://alien.slackbook.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=slackware:samba

It is somewhat slackware-centric but could easily use it on Fedora and was able to setup a shared folder and access it from Windows in no-time.

NOTE: If after doing everything your windows machine STILL can not see/access/login-into your samba server do a “service smb restart”.