[Samba] samba slow writing from XP except w/VNC in background

[Scott Preston]

I fear this is yet another thread that will remain unanswered, but as you
can tell from the subject line there's a twist.

Basically I am doing an XCOPY from my XP machine to my Linux box running
samba 3.0.22. 

Everything works, but it's very slow for the Gigabit Ethernet it's running
on compared with FTP to the same machine and directory with the same files,
say 1/10th the speed.

So I have been modifying smb.conf tweaking, restarting, etc. via VNC and I
noticed something. When I had VNC in the background, SAMBA was as fast as
FTP, when it was minimized or not connected, I was back to the slow speeds.

There's nothing special about my configuration, just the standard install
with a few shares done through GNOME.

Any insight would be awesome!

Thanks,
Scott