Can't see smb shares in Mountain Lion

Question

If I go to Go and go to network
I can see the currently powered computers on my network. We have (from left to right) WinXP, Linux (embedded), and Vista.
If I explore into one of them, I can see its shares:
If I open a share then it appears to mount it (the finder icon in the top bar changes, and the behaviour of going "up" a folder (command up-arrow) takes me to the mac folder, where I can then see that it has an eject icon, so it is mounted.
but it still doesn't show up on either "shared", or "devices" in the finder bar. So if I close the window accidentally, how do I get back to it easily?
If I use Go > Connect to server, and then specify the share (smb://pc/share)
I also get a window which is mounted as a drive that does not show up anywhere except in the mac folder.
If I close the finder window, the only way I have found so far to get back to this folder where my network drive is mounted, is to click my home folder:
right click the finder window title
and then select 'Tim's MacBook Air'.
The drives don't even show up on my desktop.
Is there a better way where I can just have any network drive I mount just turn up on the side bar? Is there a special key combination to open the folder that has my mounted drives in it?

Answer 1

Finder window must be open before the shares are mounted for them to appear in the Finder sidebar. Unfortunately, that means even if you use Applescript, you will need to open finder. Or open it and close it for drives to mount automatically.
You can try the script below:
tell application "Finder"
  open ("/Applications" as POSIX file) -- replace /Applications with whichever folder you want finder to highlight
  mount volume "smb://nameofyourserver/nameofyourshare"
end tell
add
<key>LSBackgroundOnly</key>
<string>1</string>
to your info.plist after you create the applescript app so that the app runs invisible