I wrote a KB article back when I supported MS-DOS in 1994, the article is at http://support.microsoft.com/?id=119350. I found when testing the behavior reported in the article that performance suffers pretty significantly with anything over a few thousand files in a given directory, at least in MS-DOS.

It wouldn't surprise me if the same behavior exists in later versions of our OS's but I would not expect to see the degree of difference that you report. I like the suggestion of checking for AV software. If you are using AV software, try excluding the file extension for your CAD files.

>One of my jobs is being an MIS. I have a CAD department to take care of. We have a drawing directory that has 25k + files in it.
>
>I am trying to upgrade the workstations form windows 98 to XP.
>
>windows 98 can open that directory in about 30 seconds. XP takes about 9 minutes. I have allowed indexing for that drive/folder.
>
>I really hate to have to break that up into smaller directories, but it looks like my only solution. It's gonna require me some foxpro coding that is really not going to be very exciting. Anybody have any ideas out there.
>
>Oh, I've also tweaked the MTU settings, no advantage.