10.4 Keychain for Appleshare password repeatedly breaks

Hello all, couldn’t find a solution to this one after spending days searching for someone else with a similar problem.

I have a bunch of computers in elementary classrooms spread across multiple school buildings and they all need on-demand access to a share folder containing a database. In these buildings, I do not use per-user authentication (I do in our middle school however) and as such they are not bound to our Active Directory system. They auto-login to the default user account (named User) and all have a keychain entry to connect to the AFP share on our Win2003 server that houses the database (obviously using SFM). Now, all works great for a week, then breaks. Then another week, and then breaks.

To go into detail, I initially gave them all a login keychain that had the address “afp://shehs01dc1/1-4read” stored. In the Access Control, I set it to allow all applications to access the item and it all worked just peachy… for a week. So I went about fixing it after finding that now when it tried connecting, it was using “afp://10.22.16.16:548/1-4read” instead. I was a bit puzzled, but went ahead and sent out a new login keychain file to all the computers, and once more it all worked for another week. Now this morning I’m back in the same dilemma because NOW it wants to connect to “afp://10.22.16.16/1-4read”. GAH!

Is there something I’m doing wrong here? Does the AFP client try multiple different addresses for the same connection? Note, this is happening on ALL machines at the same time. Reverting back to my initial settings, keychains, etc fixes nothing. I’ve checked my DNS, it has proper host and pointer entries for the server and the clients are resolving properly, so why does it keep trying different addresses for the same host?