I've observed strange behavior both on the client and server when using Nautilus to view and manage files on a remote host. With ftp, nautilus will sometimes just hang and start spinning the CPU -- I can click the Stop button and get the interface back, but with a thread pegging the CPU everything is slower. On smb:, nautilus will on occasion create exceptional numbers of connections to the remote host. I've only seen this once, but it seems related to the stop button behavior.
Huh? The smb module should only *ever* user one connection per smb server and share. Do you know more exactly what you did to get this? Anyway, if you really like general Nautilus bugs fixed you should report them upstream. That is currently bugzilla.eazel.com and will move to bugzilla.gnome.org soonish. If it is in the redhat tracker we might fix it if is simple and we have nothing else to do, but fat chance of that... :)
I believe the smb issue is fixed in gnome-vfs-extras-0.2.0-1.
Lots of bugs along these lines have been fixed, assuming one of them was the one you were seeing. Hard to know, of course.