I have 2 Pc's both P3 550, 128Mb, win98 se and with 3Com 905c-TX network cards. they are connected using a 10/100 switch & tcp/ip. PC no 1 has a shared folder that all the documents are stored on. As pc no 2 opens & closes files during a day's work via the shared folder (that is a mapped drive)pc no 1 gradually gets slower & slower. until it needs to be rebooted (pc no 1 is also used during this time). both pc's connect & disconnect to the internet via modems often during the day. Any help or suggestions would be good. Thanks.

I used to have the same problems before with my network. I mean, I had the exact same scenario that you're describing in the paragraph above. What helped me with this problem was Dr. Salman's Windows Power Tools. This little application has a setting to optimize your machine for network/LAN. This will speed up your connection like you wouldn’t believe ! I suggest you install it in both machines and activate that setting. You can find a demo of this software at download.com and you could crack it if wanted to, but let's pretend I didn’t say that ! Good luck !

The first computer is caching files computer number two looks at. As the day goes on, the first computer is caching like crazy. Couple of things you can do -- increase ram on number one, play with the swap file size. Sometimes a huge swap file can be bad because the first computer much read and rewrite that entire file to do any disk caching. WIN also caches recently accessed files to ram (try opening a huge file, closing it, then reopening it. Notice how much faster it opens the second time.) I don't think Lan settings are your problem, or they would be a problem right at start-up.