I have a network infrastructure of Windows XP clients (a mix of XP and 64-bit XP), that are accessing a network share on a Windows 2008 R2 server. Whenever users type the address of a folder into the address bar of Windows Explorer it's as snappy at determining the contents of the current folder and presenting them to you in the address bar as if you're working on a local drive.

But if you open one of the subfolders users get the animated red torch and 'Searching for items...' dialog, typically for 45 seconds.

Similarly when using the open folder dialog to try and select a subfolder on this share it takes, on average, 45 seconds for the dialog to expand each node and show the subfolders of each node.

Also, while the Explorer instance accsesing the network share is running slowly users notice that the performance of all other Explorer windows suffers. So while Explorer is searching for files on the network share they can't switch to another task and navigate around their local drive using Explorer because it's now as slow as a dead dog at accessing anything.

Are there any settings we can change which will improve the performance accessing network shares?