Question : Files from the "home folder" of user in Windows server 2003 AD slow to access

We are using a Novell 6.5 and Windows Server 2003 AD mixed environment : all users have accounts on both systems and we have share drives on Novell server and a personal "home folder" setup from the Windows server for each user. I noticed that the files accessed from the Novell shared folders have no problem opening fast, but from the shared users folder (ie: on my Windows server) they take a few secondes to being open (up to 10secondes for normal Word / Excel files - under 1mb). After you open one file, other files open very quickly from that path, and then after X min of inactivity, the first one takes too long to open.
It's as if the connection goes in some "idle" state, disconnects from Windows server, adn next time we want to access it, it takes a while to reconnect.
This problem always been there, since a few months since we migrated the personal files on the Windows server (eventually we would migrate all files to it, and switch from Novell)

I have no idea if this is a setting in Windows server or a Novell bug, but please help me finding the problem or showing me tools that could analyse this.
any idea would help, thanks.

Answer : Files from the "home folder" of user in Windows server 2003 AD slow to access

This is very similar to a question answered here recently (http://www.experts-exchange.com/Networking/Novell_Netware/Q_25340131.html)

From that question:

Timeouts can happen as the NetWare client tries to resolve the windows server name in the UNC, so the client needs to be told which servers to *not* try to resolve.. You need to  go into advanced setting in the client,  and reduce the bad server timeouts to 1 or 2 seconds, and make  sure the bad server  cache in enabled,  Then add a registry  entry as per this TID:

http://support.novell.com/docs/Tids/Solutions/10090785.html

We  did that with our hybrid network, and there are no slow downs accessing  the windows servers.