Out of interest, do you have optimistic locking enabled on your Novell servers?

If you have, then I suggest you remove it and try again - but don't ask me how as I'm not a Notware administrator...some Navell clients also include this in their Advanced options page.

As an even wilder guess, is there a Transmit Threshold setting on your network cards that is set to some high number? There is an outside chance that doing that could buffer the changed data until a timeout occurs or something similar?

Regards
Simon