Information about fuse-smb is bit scarce and nothing I've found specific to the Acer. Installation isn't difficult and the result works well for me.
You don't need to have shares mounted when you switch on, so nothing slows down the normal startup. With a simple script and a desktop shortcut, you can browse your network when you need using the Thunar File Browser.

To install on the AAO, press Alt+F2 to open the Run dialog and check "Run in Terminal" or select Terminal from the Desktop menu, to open a terminal window. Type the following command:

Fuse is automatically loaded on the AAO, at least I didn't find I needed to use modprobe anywhere.

Now you need to set permissions to use fuse. Type the following:

You'll need to reboot before these permissions are recognised, but do that later. Fuse-smb gets it settings from .smb/fusesmb.conf, which is not created automatically. Depending on your network, the default settings will probably work, but if some of your shared folders need passwords to gain access, then you will need to create a .smb/fusesmb.conf. In this situation do the following:

Look through the comments in the file, lines beginning with ; You should either enter your username and password in the [global] section or create entries for specific servers or shares. Save the file when done.

To be able to use the shares you must mount the fusesmb filesystem to an existing directory. I chose to create my mount point in the /media folder, as this is where Linpus mounts other removable media.

Now the actual mounting of the shares:

To test if its working, browse /media/network with Thunar file manager or use the following:

If all is well, you should see your workgroup and be able to browse all the servers and shares that you have. It may take a few seconds the first time for machines to appear, but subsequently the information is cached and updated periodically.

So we can now access our network drives using the file manager, but its still hard to get up and running. There are suggestions for auto starting the process, but that's just going to slow down startup and with a mobile device like the AAO, you won't want your home network all the time anyway. My solution, a short script to run fusesmb if the folder is empty, then launch Thunar to display the netwok folder. All this wrapped up in a .desktop file and added to the files section of the desktop. Here's how:

First create the script...

Next create the .desktop file.

Now add the icon to the desktop (13 is the Files section):

The result looks like this:
I know it could do with a better icon. This is just the default network icon. If anyone can provide an icon to match the default colour scheme, I'll gladly host it here.