At my company I frequently need to access shared files over a Windows network. These files are located on the other side of the planet, so I guess the file share goes through some kind of VPN over Internet, but I don't control this and it is supposed to be "transparent" for me. However it is extremely slow. Displaying the content of a directory in the file explorer takes about 10s. Even if over the Internet, I did not expect that retrieving a list of file names would be that long. Are there any settings to optimize this from my Windows XP workstation, or is it mostly related to the way the network is configured? The only thing I have found so far is to cache all file names, while by default only short file names are cached (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/843418).