Just to warn you, I am being picky here but nevertheless hope someone can help me out. I have 4 PCs (2 are win98 and 2 are winxp pro) sharing a gigabit switch and all have gigabit ethernet cards. I share files a lot between them. Using network neighborhood/network places, the win98 machines can browse the other machines very quickly. Browsing the C drive of the remote 3 machines is about as quick as browsing the local C drive, meaning it is instantaneous. But when I am on one of the winxp pro machines, there is a 2-3 second delay anytime I try to browse one of the remote machines. I would like to eliminate this delay. I have deleted the registry keys that force a search of remote printers and scheduled tasks, both of which are in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Remote Computer\NameSpace That helped somewhat, but xp is still clearly slower than win98 when browsing the network. Does anyone know what else I can do to the xp machines to speed up their browsing? Thanks. Note that I am not talking about file transfer speeds - just the delays in showing directory contents.

On every network browsing at shared folders on a remote PC, Windows 2000 and Windows XP is looking for a scheduled tasks to start. In normal cases there are no tasks to start and so you can avoid this by deleting a special registry key on the Windows 2000 or Windows XP PCs. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\ CurrentVersion\Explorer\RemoteComputer\NameSpace\{D6277990-4C6A-11CF-8D87-00AA0060F5BF} This will speed up browsing shared folder.

Yes I had mentioned that above (in the top post) but the xp machines are still noticeably slower in browsing speed.

So the only way to avoid the 2 seconds of waiting time is to map the shared folder as a drive, e.g. X: or whatever you like between F and Z.

mapping the shared folder as a drive results in the same delay. The delay is larger when there are a large numbers of files in the folder. Maybe winxp is searching for attributes or something?

Windows XP stores the password in the login information management. When you try to browse a Windows 95/98/ME PC, Windows XP tries to connect to a Domain Controller to check the password. Since there is no Domain Controller in a Workgroup Environment, you have to wait for a timeout that is by default 2 seconds. That's the case.

That is interesting, but I do not think that is the issue. However I have figured out how to replicate the problem. If on my local xp machine I go to c:\windows then click any folder, say the addins folder, and then go back a level (back to c:\windows), it is instantaneous. If I then browse in the same manner to one of the remote machines (say \\othercomputer\windows\addins and then back to \\othercomputer\windows\), there is a delay while my local hard drive has something being written to it. If I do all of the above from a win98 machine, it is instantaneous no matter if I am on the local machine or a remote machine. winxp appears to be caching or calculating something when browsing a remote folder. It doesn't matter which remote machine I am browsing btw.