Thanks Al, I'll try to test your hunches.

>>I have moved the Visual SourceSafe DATA to a folder on a NAS server. That server is linux-based. The VSS client is still on the local (Windows) machine.
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>>When using VSS I get very frequent hangs and also SS.INI is not properly renamed.
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>>During operation VSS renames the ss.ini to a tempfile (e.g. to ss12E.tmp) and changes it back to ss.ini on shutdown. The restoration of the original name frequently (but not always) fails.
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>>Also VSS frequently hangs while managing the real data in the Data folder. When I track the activity of SSEXP.EXE with Process Monitor (Sysinternals) it hangs on a seemingly random file that it tries to open. After exactly one minute it displays ACCESS DENIED in the Process Monitor and then tries again, endlessly, leaving the user with the perception that the application does nothing at all. Killing the app (ctrl+alt+del) is the only option left.
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>>Moving the data to a local machine or to another windows based pc in the network resolves all issues, so perhaps LINUX is a crucial factor here?
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>Probably not Linux per se, more likely the configuration of Samba, the Linux process that emulates an SMB file server. The completeness of SMB support (as defined by Microsoft, the owner of the spec) by Samba can vary a lot. I remember some early NASs didn't even support multiple simultaneous access to files (i.e. file and record locking).
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>I don't have any experience tweaking Samba but my understanding is that it can be made very compatible, such that you don't see problems even with intense VFP multi-user data tables. Theoretically you should be able to tweak Samba on your NAS. But, the typical Web interface may not offer you fine control of Samba. If the NAS can give you a command-line shell you may be able to manually configure Samba but you'd need to find the parameters and commands appropriate to its distro.
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>Muddying the waters further, with Windows Vista Microsoft introduced SMB2. A lot of NASs are not compatible with this. Recently, I tried to set up a Vantec NexStar NAS for a client's home network, to act as a target for Windows Vista backup. That simply does not work, Vista Backup complains that it's not a suitable backup device, even though it can be seen from Windows Explorer in Vista.