I had exactly the same issue but with Samba 4 exports and Windows 7 clients. It is definitely client side error. After some thorough troubleshooting, I simply added the registry key and it worked like a charm after hitting the F5 button once.
Only had to add this registry key:
DirectoryCacheLifetime[DWORD] = 0
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Lanmanworkstation\Parameters
The values mentioned in this article seem to be invalid, as these registry values no longer exist. I believe that the default expiry time for the cache is 10 minutes rather than 10 seconds. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff686200%28v=ws.10%29.aspx
UPDATE(20/04/2015)
If you are interested in applying this on server side without the need to configure the clients you must add the following line in the [global] section within smb.conf:
server max protocol = SMB2_02
This will limit the server down to protocol SMB2 rather than the default SMB3 which comes with Samba 4 but it compromises the transfer speed. I believe that protocol SMB2_02 is an early version of SMB2 which doesn’t support caching, so it should work in this case.
However I noticed that a few clients were still experiencing caching issues and had to manually change registry as described above.
Unfortunately there isn’t much documentation about the various SMB protocol versions. Here is what the man page for smb.conf says about this:
