I am running a SAMBA server on an office network and am having a couple of problems with the Windows XP clients (clients with the other versions of Windows seemto be working OK). Essentially it boils down to painfully slow Microsoft Networking, i.e. it takes about 30 seconds for folders on the server with > 4000 files in them to show when selected on the clients. It also takes a long time (like 1 hour) to load a user's profile of around 300 meg. In terms of broader network functions, e.g. pinging, e-mail and web browsing, the performance is fine. The XP clients are also slow when accessing file shares on a Windows ME machine on the network. I know that SAMBA doesn't promise any support for Windows XP, but has anyone else run into this sort of problem (presumably common with NT 4 servers) or know of a solution?

I ran into something similar last night on my little 5 machine network in my office with my one new XP computer. I found that XP does not install the NetBEUI protocol that the other computers like to use (instead of TCP/IP to grant access which XP perfers). Instructions to install the protocol go to: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;en-us;q301041. You'll have to load it on the XP machine after installing. Good luck.