[Samba] XP client awfully slow

[Gerald Heinig]

Hi all,

please excuse my posting what is probably an FAQ, but getting the mail
archives is excruciatingly slow (~70 bytes/sec).

I have an XP professional box attached to a Samba server. It works
ok-ish (I can actually access everything) but everything is painfully
slow. Attaching a network drive takes at least 10 seconds, sometimes
longer. Word takes AGES to load (> 15 seconds before anything happens)
and I can't save files to a network driver within Word; I have to "save
as" to a local disk and then copy over to the network drive.
Strangely enough, even accessing stuff on a _local_ drive is slow with a
network connection, although I'm not actually writing to the network
drive.
Our admin says we have a WINS server running (for what it's worth...).

Could some kind soul enlighten me as to what might be the problem? It's
no fun trying to work like this :-(

Cheers,

Gerald

PS. Is there any mailing list archive that's searchable, or a mailing
list archive mirror? The main site is glacially slow from here.