Just out of interest, do you have opportunistic locking turned on?

This can be turned off on a per client basis, or on the server itself.

This has been known to cause trouble with FoxPro data corruption, but not sure about the EXE side of things.

Running XP with Netware is a bit of a mess anyway because XP cannot obtain and store server resource lists, so it keeps looking continuously to see if resources exist. That's another good reason to keep the application exe on the workstations. All of this equals more network traffic. Perhaps this is why Novell have announced the end of Netware in favour of Linux...

Regards
Simon