I have now reloaded windows7 & all updates, made all the changes to sharing, secpol etc as suggested in the posts and the ms support sites, only one password throughout..

Still the same. it looks like its the domain/userid problem at windows network login as mentioned on the ms support sites...I'll move on now..
thks for everybodys posts..if a solution does appear that works for me I'll post it here..

It may be worth researching Samba. I think you have to be at version 3.4.x for Win7 to work correctly if Samba is being used as a PDC. There may also be other Samba/Win7 bugs. I suspect it is not a Draytek issue at all.

you could well be right....

does anyone know which version of samba is being used...

I had the same problem when I was using the same user name on the router as I used to log in to Windows. Switching to a different user name on the router fixed the problem...

i'm using admin on the router and user1 on the network...still researching...II think its a samba version ..windows7 domain problem