I was a little puzzled the other day when, in the Finder's Network file sharing window, I saw a machine named 'MAC001B23CF43,' sharing in the Windows format. I knew I didn't have any machines named like that on my network. The name was pretty straightforward, but hardly elegant like 'SuperMac' or 'MarioMac' or whatnot, like the Apple side of its filesharing was setup.

The solution?

I checked the computer's name and it had a number of non-standard characters in it and a few spaces. So, Samba (the mechanism behind Leopard's file sharing for Windows) was confused by the name for the Mac for Windows File Sharing and named itself 'MAC#########,' where # is the Ethernet address of the Mac.

So I renamed the computer to something without spaces or high ASCII characters, and now the Mac has a reasonable, human-friendly name.