[Samba] Ubuntu samba slower than red hat??

[Douglas D Germann Sr]

Hi--

About 10 days ago I switched from a Red Hat 9.0 machine
as my Samba server to Ubuntu. Ever since, things have 
been slow.

How do I mean, slow?

1st clue: previously, when I saved docs in OOo Writer, 
I would go ctrl-S and once every 4th or 5th time it 
would say it couldn't create a backup; now it is
every time. So to save I have to go ctrl-S esc esc ctrl-S.

2nd clue: WinXP on login to the server times out before 
connecting the three drives it tries to connect--never before.

3rd clue: WinXp used to load directories instantly; now 
it takes 4-5 seconds.

There is some other weirdness too: when logged in to the 
server it reports the file owner and group as dean:1005. 
dean is the name of another user on this client machine, 
but rarely used. It should see it as doug:data, which is 
how the server sees it. 

Also it used to see the files as 
-rwxrwSrwt  1 root root 4.0K 2003-01-25 03:18 wgetrc

Now it sees them as
-rwxrwxrwx  1 dean data   99 1993-09-28 22:07 TEST.SDW


The new server: Ubuntu 6.06, Celeron D 2.53Ghz, one 
200GB HDD, 6 months old. samba 3.0.22
The old server: RedHat 9.0, Celeron 2Ghz, one 
80GB HDD with OS on it, one 120GB HDD with only data 
on it, at least 3 years old. Samba is at least that old.
2.2.7a-security-rollup-fix

So the question is, how can I speed up the Ubuntu samba? 
How would you troubleshoot this?

Some ideas I have not yet tried:

1. Remove all the commented lines from the smb.conf 
file.

2. Perhaps older versions of samba are just faster 
than the newer ones, and I should learn to live with it.

3. Perhaps there are some tweaks in samba that I need to 
learn about.

4. Copy over the old smb.conf file to the new system.

Where should I start? What is most likely to have a good 
payoff for time invested?

Thanks!

:- Doug.