[Samba] Explorer freezes browsing certain samba folders

[Stewart Baillie]

Greetings,

I'm running into some curious and undesirable behaviour from windows 
explorer when I browse certain folders in my samba share - explorer 
freezes for some considerable time before displaying the contents with 
their little icons.  This happens from both W2K SP4 and XP SP1 clients.

For example, explorer routinely freezes for 20 seconds or longer when I 
open the innocuous directory listed below via samba:

# ls -la downloads/Mozilla
total 27116
drwxr-sr-x   4 root NGHEALTH+Web Admins     4096 May 19 15:08 .
drwxrwsr-x  43 root NGHEALTH+Web Admins     4096 May 31 11:22 ..
drwxr-sr-x   2 root NGHEALTH+Web Admins     4096 May 19 11:53 extensions 
- firefox
-rwxr--r--   1 root NGHEALTH+Web Admins  4827008 May  5 11:03 Firefox 
Setup 1.0.3.exe
-rwxr--r--   1 root NGHEALTH+Web Admins  4827968 May 19 11:21 Firefox 
Setup 1.0.4.exe
-rwxr--r--   1 root NGHEALTH+Web Admins 12009680 Dec 22 10:58 
mozilla-win32-1.7.5-installer.exe
drwxr-sr-x   3 root NGHEALTH+Web Admins     4096 Jan 28 11:31 
Sunbird-0.2rc2-win32
-rwxr--r--   1 root NGHEALTH+Web Admins  6017334 Mar 31 11:06 
Thunderbird Setup1.0.exe
-rwxr--r--   1 root NGHEALTH+Web Admins     1248 May 19 09:36 user.js

An ethereal trace shows an incredible amount of traffic during this 
freeze period, as if the each file in the directory is being read in 
it's entirety in 512 byte blocks.  During this time the file icons 
slowly change from their generic look to their customised look.  This 
freeze doesn't happen if I share the same folder from a W2K server.

I'm running FC2 with all updates applied as of early May 2005 including:
    smp kernel 2.6.10-1.771
    samba 3.0.10

Any ideas on this and how to stop the client freezing?

Regards,
Stewart.