Good news, everyone.

I managed to get my passworded CIFS shares to mount under OS2008! They are visible in File Manager and other apps, too!

The solution is pretty straightforward. I needed to get two files.

The first one is the cifs.ko from fanoush's module archive, getting it out of the archive and onto your tablet requires some know-how (ie ask someone else ) I recommend making the proper module directory and putting the cifs.ko into that dir. The correct module dir name for OS2008 is:

/lib/modules/2.6.21-omap1/


The second one is mount.cifs from the Debian Sid armel smbfs package. Download it into a directory on your tablet, then, as root, use
to extract the contents to a folder, then do:
So, to get my share to mount, I did the following as root (this can be put in a script):
(Note that this may fail with a "file exists" error, that's OK, it means your system already has it loaded)
...replacing the proper things in the proper places, of course...

It just works. To see if I was doing this for nothing, I unmounted the share and tried
only to get the familiar "Mount: .... failed" error.

Hopefully that helps someone else who is having the same problems.

PS: I first tried to install the whole Samba package from the Debian Sid armel repository. It depended on all sorts of stuff, and by the time I was done, I had replaced libc6 and other core system libraries. That totally toasted my system, and I had to reflash. Thankfully, I backed up before I began that adventure, so I was back up and ready to try again the next day.