Slow network browsing in Windows XP

There’s a common problem in Windows XP that can make network browsing very slow.

If the 'My Network Places' folder contains a shortcut to a network share, then each refresh of the explorer window will attempt to read icon information from every file in the remote location, causing the system to slow to a crawl.

Removing all shortcuts from 'My Network Places' will return the system response to normal.

Every time you open a file via a UNC name, Windows XP will automatically add another shortcut to the 'My Network Places' folder - so the issue tends to get worse over time.

You can prevent the automatic addition of shortcuts by setting HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer\NoRecentDocsNetHood to 1.

Q841978 - Explorer.exe stops responding when you use network shortcuts (XP)

Similar issues affect the Start menu and Desktop - placing a shortcut to a network resource in either location can drastically slow down system response, particularly when the network resource is unavailable. Shortcuts to Domains or Machines don't suffer from these problems as they always have the same icon.

There are methods of accessing the network that will avoid this performance problem:

Method 1
Create a drive map and use this to browse the network files.

Method 2
Create a shortcut to explorer.exe and pass the UNC name of the resource.
e.g.
explorer /e, \\Server\FileShare

desktop.ini

A second issue that will also slow down browsing is the desktop.ini feature. This affects Windows XP Sp1 clients using mapped drives or UNC connections.

When listing a directory Windows XP will search for and parse Desktop.ini files. This will noticably affect performance when a large number of subfolders are involved - it does this for the current folder and one level down the directory tree.

Desktop.ini can be used to provide a custom icon, thumbnail view, pop up description and background pattern.
In additions to this 'eye candy' desktop.ini can make normal file folders into 'Special Folders' (eg Fonts, History, Temporary Internet Files, "My Music", "My Pictures", and "My Documents").

Desktop.ini files are only visible in Windows Explorer if you first un-check "Hide protected operating system files" (under Tools, Options, View)

To see the file locks created by this process run the following command on the file server, while an XP client is (slowly) listing a large directory:

NET FILE | Find "desktop.ini"
or
OPENFILES /s MyServer |Find "desktop.ini"

This issue is discussed in Q840309 (included in XP sp2)

A quick solution to this performance problem is to delete the non-essential .ini files:

attrib desktop.ini -h -s
del desktop.ini

Before doing this in bulk you should compare your existing folders with some empty folders that don't have any desktop.ini files to see if this improves browsing response time:

Create a separate (testing) file share,
then create 1000 sub folders - from the command line:

FOR /L %G in (1,1,1000) do md test%G

To delete all desktop.ini files one level below the current directory run the following from the command line:

FOR /f %G in ('dir /b') do attrib %G\desktop.ini -h -s

FOR /f %G in ('dir /b') do del %G\desktop.ini

Other browsing issues
Also consider: AntiVirus software, DNS configuration, the NTFS volume (security descriptors & indexes) defrag and CHKDSK.

Browsing Network Neighbourhood is slow
Workstations which don't need Peer-to-Peer File, Print, or named-pipe sharing can disable the server service to reduce browse master traffic. This will also disable use of the admin$ share.

"Total world oil reserves amount to one thousand billion barrels, yearly consumption is 27 billion barrels" - BP Amoco

Related:

SysInternals - Mark Russinovich traces the same issue (it's fixed in Vista)
Q904160 - File sharing on the network is slower than expected (WinServer 2003 SP1)
Q841978 - Explorer.exe stops responding when you use network shortcuts (XP)
Q834350 - Access to network resources is slower
Q823372 - Word documents take a long time to open
Q822219 - Slow File Server Performance
Q819017 - Long delay before files appear in My Computer (XP)
Q816375 - XP Explorer pane flickers
Q814112 - Network shares open slowly SMB/AntiVirus scanning
Q320138 - Disable automatic search for network printers and folders (XP)
Q320829 - Increase the Request Size Buffer on the file server - (try between 32 and 64 Kb)
Q315237 - 100-Megabit network packets
Q321281 - Desktop.ini does not work correctly when you customise the Default Profile
Q312403 - Distributed Link Tracking
Q245800 - Delay viewing shares (Windows 98/2000)
MFT Zone - Tune NTFS for small files
CleanMgr - Automated cleanup of Temp files, recycle bin
Max Cached Icons - Resize the icon cache