[Samba] Slow browsing

[sim]

Hi,

I have recently set up an old machine as a linux fileserver (Intel 815E 
board with 512MB ram and PIII 800mhz). I am running the latest Fedora Core 5 
with the version of samba 3 that ships with that and am exposing a single 
share for my software raid (4x400gb PATA seagate drives, running from two 
siig ATA cards so each drive has its own channel)

I also have a buffalo 1.0tb terastation network storage drive that runs 
samba configured as raid 5 , though I am not sure of the version of samba it 
is running, though I believe it is a 2.0 version

My wife also has a G5 mac running the latest OSX version, setup to use samba 
but it is on a different workgroup.

Everything is hooked up via 100 base wired ethernet.

When browsing from my XP pro desktop the file server computer icon shows up 
very quickly but when I browse to a share on the machine it takes about 30 
seconds to display the shares. This behavior continues as I access files on 
the share.

All the other shares from the terastation and mac etc appear almost 
immediately.

I ping'ed all my machines from all my other machines and the network speed 
to and from the server seems the same as to and from the other machines so 
it doesn't seem to be a network issue to me.

The power went of this morning and that shut down the linkstation and mac. 
Usually they are always on and so are powered up when the linux server comes 
up, but that situation was reversed this morning, and the linux server was 
booted first. I now noticed that there was a delay browsing to the 
terastation and that the linux shares appeared almost immediately. However 
the delay was not as bad as the original delay on the linux server (only 
about 5-10 seconds).

Do multiple instances of samba servers cause browsing issues like that? I am 
using user level security. Is there something else going on causing the slow 
browsing?
If there is some incompatibility with multiple servers how can I rectify it?

Thanks for any help

Simon