I've now tested Alfresco 2.2E on Mac OS X, and I get exactly the same problem of the server locking and CIFS disconnecting. Am I completely missing the point here?
My understanding is that CIFS is not auto mounted by virtual-tomcat, and therefore you need to manually mount the CIFS AVM. (The alfresco-virtserver.properties file notes that the automount functionality is not implemented). Without the AVM mounted, any JSPs using getRealPath() won't work (I'm using velocity, which relies on that).
Has anyone actually managed to get virtualisation to work with something more complicated than the examples in the Alfresco sample app?