XP slowdown accesing network drives

  • Thread starter Thread starter Kelly
  • Start date Start date
K

Kelly

I have 6 different machines that all seem to hang or
slowdown to a crawl when accessing any network drive.
I've checked the KB and the only thing I could find was
article Q294756 but I don't have that Antivirus
installed. Anyone ever run into this?

If you click on a drive, the window will open, but it will
be all white and have a timer. After 5 to 10 minutes, the
drive will finally show up. If, during this time, you try
and do something else on the PC. The whole PC will become
unstable and you will need to reboot.

All the machines are running XP with very little other
software. They are all different makes and models so I
know its not vendor related.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
 
What kind of network cards do you have installed?

It sounds to me that you might get better performance from
choosing a single-vendor solution re: your ethernet
cards. My suspicion is that you may have a bad ethernet
card that is spewing out malformed packets... I have
experienced similar problems before, and on that occasion
a bad network card turned out to be the culprit.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Glendon Gross
 
The cards are all what came with the PC's.

They range from onbaord NIC's in laptops, PCMCIA cards,
and PCI NIC cards.

I've checked all the settings on the cards themselves and
see nothing out of the ordinary. Of course I could be
overlooking something, as I'm willing to guess it has
something to do with a setting.


Thanks again.
 
Is there a possibility that packets are being dropped due
to a NetBIOS namespace collision? I would look hard to
make sure there aren't any duplicate names on the
network. I would also try the process of elimination by
removing machines one at a time from the picture until the
problem clears up. If it is a misconfiguration on a
specific machine (such as a MTU value that is too large,
causing some intermediate router to drop packets) then you
may gain a clue by the way the process changes after
specific machines have been temporarily removed from the
picture.

Does the instability happen on some machines more than
others? Is there a possibility that Internet Connection
Firewall may be misconfigured on one of the machines,
causing authentication packets to be dropped?

Here I am shooting in the dark, but at least this offers
you a possible strategy with which to investigate further.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Glendon Gross
 
I have run into a slow down using Mcaffee as a virus
scanner also. Best way to find out what is going on is to
open the Task Manager and see what is hogging all of the
CPU or memory. I had a similar problem, Mcaffee was using
in excess of 200MB of ram.
 
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