Slow initial access to share on DC

I have a small new 2003 AD domain setup. The single DC serves as DHCP, DNS,
AD, and file server for a small satellite office of 5 people.

All clients are XP SP2.

Almost every time a client initially accesses a file share on the server, it
takes over 10 seconds to get an initially directory listing when viewing the
share through windows explorer.

I've mapped drive letters for everyone w/ "net use" in a GPO for the OU.

I've recreated everyone's profile ( had to so login script would work ).

DNS is working - domain name resolves, server resolves.

It's slow enough that something has to be done. I've seen a lot of
references to a lot of little reg hacks and a lot questions like mine that
have gone unsolved.

I was hoping someone can give me someone here can give me the straight poop
as to what works. It seems the problem is using a DC as a file server, yes ?

Thx in advance !!

KH

Been my experience this is a dns configuration issue. The time period
relates to what steps name resolution goes thru until it finally reaches
doing broadcasts which are then responded to. Usually the result of the
wrong dns server entry on the workstations.

Wksts dns should point to the AD server. Ad dns should have the ISP's dns
servers listed in the forwarders tab.

> Wksts dns should point to the AD server. Ad dns should have the ISP's dns
> servers listed in the forwarders tab.

Did not have DHCP scope config'd exactly right initially, but I "think" I do
now. The only DNS server for the workstations and the W2K3 server itself is
the W2K3 DC. DNS settings on our DC point to our DNS server as a forwarder.

I'm still having the same issues.

Some more details on my setup :

Main office in one state w/ two DC's, running DNS on both, DHCP on DC2.
Call this Site 1.

Site two is in another state, connected via a vpn-like SSL tunnel. Site 2
is defined as a separate site in AD, and has 1 W2K3 server that runs DNS,
DHCP, and serves as their file server.

Site two was a VERY recent additon. The DC for Site2 was originally setup
in a lab environment using the same IP addressing it would use in it's
permanent home and we lab'd the routing to the new subnet. The box then had
to be shipped off to Site 2, so the DC was off line AFA AD was concerned for
almost two weeks. That did seem to P'-off AD, but it had seemed to recover.

I've run through the various dcdiag /test:<dns,connectivity,replication> on
all three domain controllers and all tests pass.

I'm wondering if the lag at the satellite office is part of a bigger
misconfiguration in DNS or AD somehow. I restarted the main DC in our main
office last night and it had several "unable to resolve DNS" error messages
when it was starting back up. Startup time for W2K3 took a long time. This
was very confusing since DC1 is the main DNS server for our windows domain.

A reboot of DC2 did not take near as long and didn't produce any DNS errors
on startup.

( My apologies if this is too long winded.. )

KH