Slow share browsing from WinXP to Win2008 R2, fine from Win7

[GuyE]

Hi

I have a weird problem to do with browsing mapped drives across a network that I hope you can help with. In short, browsing one specific mapped drive from XP clients is very slow but fine on Windows 7 clients.

The server is just over a year old running Windows 2008 R2 with all patches other than SP1. The NIC is an Intel 82575EB. As part of the initial setup I disabled global autotuning.

The server contains all of our user’s home folders in a standard setup. Student home folders sit under:

D:\HomeStudents\Yr7\..

D:\HomeStudents\Yr8\..

etc up to Yr13 with approximately 200 user folders in each year level, each shared and ACLed in the usual way. Each student has P: drive mapped to their home folder share through the home folder setup in their AD account.

Each staff member has H: drive mapped to D:\HomeStudents to allow them to browse all student home folders. This is read only access by virtue of ACL permissions on the D:\HomeStudents folder than are inherited by all subfolders.

Staff also have other drive letters mapped to various shares on the server, including some on the same physical disk array. Nobody has any problem browsing their own P drive and when a staff member browses any drive mapped to this server from a Windows 7 client, including H:, there are no performance issues at all.

When a staff member browses the same drives from an XP client (SP3 & all patched up) everything is almost instantly displayed for all drives, except H:. When they browse the student folders in the year level folders under H: it takes approximately 25 seconds to display the contents – the flashing torch scenario.

I suspect it is something to do with the networking setup on this one server but don’t know where to go from here.

Thanks for your help,

Guy

[ayodelesam]

am having the same problem, i have a print share in win 2008 server R2 - which can be accessed easily in win 7 environment, but very slow or access denied in win xp. these are computer with complete updates, and can access other resources on the network. pls if you have a clue to this will be appreciated

[Tripredacus]

There are a couple things I can think of. Windows 7 by default will use 128-bit encryption on file shares. There is an option for 40 and 56bit encryption. Also, starting with Vista there was a technology called the Link Layer Topology Mapper and Responder. These will cause slow issues on XP clients that lack this, and be fine with Win7 or Vista. I've run into this in the past and back when hybrid network populations were more common (we rarely have XP clients on the network anymore) I would disable this on the server side. Basically Server 2008+ sends extra SMB traffic that XP doesn't necessarily know how to respond.

It is possible to install the LLTD for XP but I've never done it. More info here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922120

You may also look at this:

Now those settings I made on the 2008 RTM server. Since then I've deployed 2008 R2 servers onto networks without making those changes, but our networks use Layer 3 switches now. So I am not certain which of those changes (switches or R2 version) solved that particular issue with legacy versions of Windows.