[Samba] Very slow initial opening MS-Word and MS-Excel files from Samba

[Berend Tober]

Alex Crow wrote:
> This wasn't a migration from an NT domain was it? We had the problem
> after a migration that starting up Office programs was incredibly slow -
> it turned out there were a load of Office registry entries pointing to
> UNC paths on the old Windows PDC.
> 

No. Not NT. Previous file server was Netware 5.1 (and 4.2, 4.1, and 
4.0... before that). Never had the problem on those machines. (And as a 
salute to Novell, it is pretty impressive to note that the machine we 
retired was a 1.5Ghz P4 w/ 512MB RAM and it was readily able to keep up 
with two dozen desktop clients that universally had better CPU and RAM 
specs! The new box is substantially more capable with 16x the RAM, for 
starters).

Under Netware the local workstation users did not have to explicitly map 
drive letters, because Netware had a login script utility that handled 
that. In the new environment we just established each client with 
"reconnect at login" drive letter mappings to the corresponding Samba 
shares to where all the files had been copied to from the legacy Netware 
server -- so everyone that had made desktop shortcuts into often-used 
sub-directories on the old server were still able to use them on the new 
server when the showed up on Monday morning. Those desktop shortcuts are 
certainly not the source of the problem, though, because I'm debugging 
by navigating to the file location directly in Windows Explorer, or 
using the File|Open dialog from the main menu in either app.