Hi,
Your situation is not even slightly uncommon. My usual recommendation is, if it is really important to have a networked copy, use rsync to mirror your calibre library on your networked filesystem.
That sounds like a good solution. So I had the luck, that my calibre library worked on a nas for about half a year. Not to bad for the problems you described. :-)
Problems include inconsistent support for file locking and hardlinks (file operations are atomic).
Oh, that remembers me about crappy windows software not running on a samba share. There optimistic locking and other technics lead to the same problems. So I will switch my library back to the local drive and run a script to syncronize it with rsync to the server. Tanks! Sebastian -- *Sebastian Hempel* Veilchenweg 4 · 95195 Röslau · Germany eMail: sebastian@hempel-roeslau.de GnuPG Fingerprint: 9396 67A0 D3F3 6EBB BD7C 783D 34D8 65FE 9EB7 B49F Twitter: https://twitter.com/ithempel