[JohnE]

I've set up a peer-to-peer network just to connect my desktop PC to my laptop PC. The desktop uses Windows 2000 Professional. The laptop uses Windows XP Home Edition. Both are reasonably fast machines (2GHz) with pleanty of RAM and 100 Base-T LAN.

On each machine, I've shared folders which are mapped to network drives on the other machine. However, if I simply try to copy a file from one machine to the other, even a very small file seems to take forever. When I try to copy a small file, the process starts up, then everything just sits there for about 15 seconds doing absolutely nothing (no LAN activity as far as I can see. Then, after about 15 seconds, the transfer takes place in under a second.

What on earth can be going on during that initial 15 seconds? With such high spec machines, it's difficult to think of anything that could be stalling the transfer for so long...!