I'm genuinely unsure if this is the right forum to post this in, but it's relevant to distros in my mind... read on.

Hokay, so... I have small home network of three Win-doze XP Home boxes and one Linux box running as a server (web and files). I'm using Mepis for my Linux distro and for like a SPLIT SECOND, it was working how I wanted it to.

Basically, I wanted to host all my files on the Linux box and have them be accessable via mapped network drives, also all the computers need to see each other and their respective shared folders. Like I said, I had it working for a hot minute, then it just suddenly stopped.

Now I'm trapped with no access to all my files on the Linux box. I think why it died was 'cause my router was totally eff'd (I called it the Highspeed-to-Dial-Up converter, lol). I replaced it yesterday, but still no dice (but my i-net no longer crawls, lol). The only way to access them is put them in the the Apache www folder, and that's only one-way since I don't have the FTP setup, and anyhow, FTP'ing my files would be totally lame..

My cable path is setup like this:
Two Windows boxes and the Linux box are on a hub, then plugged into the router. My house is CAT5'd but the room with the most computers only has one plug. In another room, the other windows box is plugged directly into the router.

So, what I wanted to know is this, is there a better distro that is more Windows network friendly (and better for a file/web server) that I should be using? Is my network path any sort of problem? I don't know a proper way to setup a network. Any help on this would pretty much rock my happybag, thanks! =)