FWIW, I have abandoned this plugin. We had an issue with even 1.503 (we're still on 1.503) where I could not deploy/connect to a particular Windows box no matter what I did, when smbclient had no problems at all. So, I resorted to using:

smbclient -E -A ~/.cifs_credentials "$SHARE" -c 'prompt; recurse; mput mydir' 1>/dev/null

While not as flexible as the CIFS plugin, it works. But, smbclient does not return an error if this command line fails (so the jenkins job succeeds). I have found no good way to make smbclient fail whenever there is a problem (like invalid credentials). One way I found to check for this is to try to put a file as a simple check (without mput):

echo "xts-$BUILD_NUMBER" > xts.build
smbclient -E -A ~/.cifs_credentials "$SHARE" -c 'put xts.build' 1>/dev/null
... continue with actual smbclient copy...

This fails under a few tests I performed as I had hoped, but not all.

SHARE is //system/share type share.
~/.cifs_credentials contains:
cat ~/.cifs_credentials
username=jenkins
password=password
domain=DOMAIN

There was a fix described in another ticket, related to the FTP part of publish-over as described here https://github.com/afischer211/publish-over-ftp-plugin/blob/master/src/main/java/jenkins/plugins/publish_over_ftp/BapFtpPublisherPlugin.java . I've made the same changes in the publish-cifs plugin and it works. For anyone who's not comfortable with the source change, you can download the hpi here: http://dl.bintray.com/imavroukakis/generic/publish-over-cifs.hpi . It has also been compiled against a patched version of jifs to allow large file transfers.

We are using Jenkins 1.516 and publish-over-cifs 0.2 without any problems.
But after I installed publish-over-ssh 1.10 we also lost the CIFS shares config.

Thank you very much Ioannis, your version did the job, everything is fine again.

Can someone (bap?) do this changes in the main source tree?

Had the same problem, updated to version 0.3 today and it seems to be fixed. I'd suggest you try it.

Looks like this was fixed in 0.3