In recent months, there is a 15 second delay in accessing shared
network directories from any of the PC's on my network when using
Windows Explorer. This is true for either my laptop when it is
connected (wireless) or another desktop which is hard wired through
the router/switch.
Dick Ballard
(e-mail address removed)
I have finally discovered a way to eliminate the delay. I am running
Windows XP with Norton Internet Security 2007 on all three pc's on my
network. The network is implemented using a Linksys WRT54G router. Two
desktop pc's are hard wired and the laptop is wireless.
The network gateway address is listed in Personal Firewall on the
Trusted tab of NIS, but that is apparently not enough to allow Windows
Explorer full access. I found that it is also necessary to list the IP
addresses of all three networked pc's on this tab in order to
eliminate shared resource access delays. This change needs to be done
on every pc on the network.
Before the change, the NIS Activity Log/Firewall category showed
multiple instances of unused port blocking on port 80 of inbound TCP
connection attempts whenever I selected a shared folder in Windows
Explorer on any machine. These port blocks would repeat in groups of
three at 3 second intervals every time a shared folder was accessed.
Then there would be another 9 second delay before the folder contents
would be displayed, thus creating a total wait time of about 18
seconds.
I had chased several other dead end "fixes". One common piece of
advise was to eliminate shared folder shortcuts in My Network Places.
That didn't help. Another was to eliminate Windows Explorer Scheduled
Task and Shared Printer searching. I did the relevant registry edits
to accomplish this but that didn't help either. Still another proposed
fix was to increase the SizReqBuf parameter. I didn't try that, but
based on what did work, I doubt that it would have helped.
At any rate I've got things working smoothly again. Notably, I never
found any clue to the real solution in all my searching on the net. My
search of Symantec, especially, should have turned up something. And
NIS should have added these firewall entries automatically during
installation. All of the pc's were set up on the network when NIS 2007
was installed.
What is more puzzling is that the symptoms didn't seem to indicate a
permissions issue - everything was accessible - it just took a while.
And data transfers were not slowed, just file browsing.
Dick Ballard
(e-mail address removed)
