I have some questions:

1. Which version of Novell do you have, are you using just Novell?
2. What's the NIC speed, 10, 100 megabits or combo 10/100?
3. Regarding processing speed, is the Server Processor equal or faster than the PCs processors?

I'm asking because we had the same problem a year ago when we were running this one application EXE off the NT box with the tables residing in a Novell server.

The problem got resolved by upgrading the server and migrating the whole application to NT.