Speed up network browsing in Windows XP

1) Removing all shortcuts from ‘My Network Places’ will return the system response to normal.

Every time you open a file via a UNC name, Windows XP will automatically add another shortcut to the ‘My Network Places’ folder – so the issue tends to get worse over time.

2) You can prevent the automatic addition of shortcuts by setting HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer\NoRecentDocsNetHood to 1.Method 1
Create a drive map and use this to browse the network files.

Method 2
Create a shortcut to explorer.exe and pass the UNC name of the resource.
e.g.
explorer /e, \\Server\FileShare

3) Browsing Network Neighbourhood is slow
Workstations which don’t need Peer-to-Peer File, Print, or named-pipe sharing can disable the server service to reduce browse master traffic. This will also disable use of the admin$ share.

A second issue that will also slow down browsing is the desktop.ini feature