is there any way of running apps from the pc hdd using smb shares?
if not does ne1 know why?

thx

No. You would need some kind of terminal service or secure shell.

Many times I have read that this is not possible (and probably never will be), however never I have seen a reason why. It probably has something to do with the BIOS interfering with execution code and the BIOS only accessing the harddrive directly and not using shares etc..

If you find out more about it, please post here....

it's because the xbox can't do multitasking. you would need something like a redirector which mounts the samba share as a partition or folder. it would need to run in the background of the actual app the whole time but this isn't possible because the xbox only processes one task at a time.
i'm sure there are ways around that but no one cares for now.

Think of it like this....

We know that the XBox can launch only one XBE at a time.
When we browse anything on our computer, say a Samba Share, Relax Share, FTP connection (with exceptions), we have had to execute one XBE already, in this case XBMC. We use XBMC to THEN launch SMB as a service which also allows us to access remote shares. If you then wanted to execute an app on a remote share, be it XBMC, a Game, whatever, you would be launching a 2nd XBE, which cant happen, becuase you need the Samba share thru out the duration of the time you run the app or play the game. If XBMC stops, which in turn would stop samba, then you cant 'stream' the app anymore. If it were possible to launch samba or relax in the BIOS, kinda like the FTP in the Xecuter BIOS a few months back, then it may be doable.

SMB and RelaX are only shares! They will not let you execute progrms over a wire. If SaMBa can't do it for Linux, then SMB can't do it for the xbox. That is not what the protocol was designed to do.

If you want to execute programs over the wire with your XBOX, the only way to do it is with a Linux Distro. You can set up a secure shell that will execute programs on your Linux desktop from your Linux XBOX. In that way, the desktop would be doing all of the processing while the XBOX acts as the interface. It's kind of like remote desktop.

I believe it could be possible for the XBOX to run programs over a network. However, the desktop PC would have to be able to execute XBEs, which it could not right now.