XP slow drive mapping on nt 4 domain -- Please help!

[waldoss]

We have upgraded (clean installs) some computers to XP Pro (SP1) connecting to a 4.0 domain (all SP 6a). Everything works well but slow browsing to network shares on servers and workstations -- sometimes takes up to 30 seconds. This only occurs when first connecting to a share. Then it works well until the machine is restarted or isn't used for awhile. Also, connecting by UNC rather than drive mapping is faster. We are using Wingate for DNS (not a true DNS server) and WINS for name resolution. We will be upgrading the servers to 2000 shortly but cannot at this time. All TCP/IP tools I have tried work well with no errors and name resolutions works fine. The WINS database looks good. Adding a second DNS server is difficult because Wingate doesn't work well with another one. I am not that familar with Wingate -- just my understanding. Some of the things I have tried are:

Disable net crawler (no affect)

Put IP and hostnames in the host file (helped some)

Used MS 315237 - High Rate of Collisions on 100 MB Network (no affect)

Installed newest NIC driver (no affect)

Used MS 318266 - Disable Digitally encrypt or Sign Secure Channel data (no affect)

Used MS 811492 - It may take 35 seconds to delete files with Windows XP SP1 (helped with the deleting problem but not with browsing)

Used MS 310353 - Clean Boot (no affect)

Ran Netdaig (showed no problems)

Net View (no problems)

Nbtstat (show no problems)

Enable Netbios over TCP/IP (no affect)

Turned off QoS (no affect)

Checked cables (no problems)

Event Viewer shows no related errors

Used netsh int ip reset to reset IP stack (no affect)

Nslookup on the Wingate - shows some errors. (again not that fimilar with Wingate)

We are using Cisco switches which may be the problem but don't think so. All workstations have identical hardware (HP Vectra - same model). Finally, all workstations running NT 4 or Win 2000 have no problems whatsoever.

Please help!

 

[JoeMadison]

In my similar situation of slow drive mapping and open or saving files to mapped drives: My PCs were running Symantec Corporate Edition 8.0. I was able to improve but not rectify this problem by changing the Symantec setting in Configure/ File System Realtime Protection and at the bottom of the page, uncheck Network box, under Drive types.
According to Symantec this is not necessary if the File server is being protected also. The delay is caused by both AV products scanning the file at relatively the same time.

My true feeling is that it is still an MS XP problem because we didn’t have this problem on the previous Windows 98 machines. As a matter of fact, to rule out hardware problems, a couple of the new Machines were setup with 98 as a test and they worked fine also.

The improvements were significant but not as good as on the 98 PCs. Before making this change it would take 10-20 seconds to save a small Word document on the mapped drive. After the changes it took about 2 seconds.
On the Win 98 PCs saving was instantaneous to a mapped drive.

I hope some one does have a better solution but in the meantime this has become somewhat acceptable to the client.

 

[mdobrien]

Spent the whole day on the same problem. Setting and lowering the MTU to 1450 using Dr. TCP utility on the xp pro client dramatically increased the speed of the network browse to a folder on the nt 4 server with over 8000 files.