*(Moved here from StackOverflow)*

Some time ago nearly all workstations in our team (Windows XP SP2) exhibited intermittend but frequent delays when accessing shares on the network. Typically the first access to a share which hadn't been accessed for some time resulted in a nearly frozen workstation for up to 30 seconds. Then everything started working fine again.

Using TCPView from Sysinternals I saw that during this delays there was a connection to the **netbios-ssn** port on the file server which was in state **SYN\_SENT**.

**First try:** 

Disable **NetBIOS over TCP/IP** for the intranet network adapter.

Problem solved, but I didn't like to manipulate our centrally managed network configuration for the intranet.

**Second try:** 

Disable **NetBIOS over TCP/IP** only for the VMWare network adapter (VMNet1 used for host only communications).

Problem solved again!

**My questions:** 

* Why does **NetBIOS over TCP/IP** on one network adapter disturb NetBIOS over TCP/IP on another network adapter?
* Is this problem specific to VMWare network adapters?
* Has anybody else seen this phenomen?

Additional information:

* VMWare Workstation version 6.0.3
* At the time I started seriously analysing the problem it was no more possible to find out what had been changed to our systems at the time the problems started.