There are a couple of ways you could go about this. Unfortunately, it is not (to my knowledge) very easy to actually get the shared folder to show up in your global Places menu.
First of all, go to Network as you do at the moment and open up the folder that you want access to. It should show up in the sidebar of your File Browser window and have a little eject logo beside it.
You say you can't access your files through some programs. I don't know exactly which programs you mean, but in most Open/Save dialogue boxes, you will find a mini-Places sidebar in the window itself, which should list your shared folder if you have followed the process above first.
<a class="ipsAttachLink ipsAttachLink_image" href="<fileStore.core_Attachment>/monthly_05_2010/post-1019-12752008913628.png" data-fileid="1262">[img]<fileStore.core_Attachment>/monthly_05_2010/post-1019-12752008913628.png[/img]</a>
Alternatively, (and this is a little fiddly, but should work) if you are using some applications which don't have that sidebar, you will find the shared folder inside a hidden folder called
.gvfs in your Home folder. You may need to choose 'Go to Folder' or similar, and type in
~/.gvfs, but then you should be able to access your files.
The other way you could go about this is to manually 'mount' your shared folder. This would mean that the contents of your shared folder on the drive would be sort of 'attached' to a local folder on your Linux system and that is where you would look on the filesystem to see your shared files. This process is a lot more complicated, however, and since this is your first experience with Linux, I'd recommend trying the above first! If you do want to go down the route of mounting your shared folder, there are
detailed technical instructions here. We can help you with that if you'd like, but again, this is a much more advanced and technical solution which would need some use of the terminal.