DFS Slowness, caused by VMware Workstation…huh???

It’s been a while since I posted anything here, sorry ’bout that.   I thought I would submit this quick post as it’s been driving me crazy for sometime now.  If you are running a Windows DFS environment and all seems well except on a few machines, check to see if you have VMware Workstation 6.x installed.  Both my test machines do have this installed which causes long hanging issues when browsing DFS shares.  Using the physical node name to connect to the shares works fine.

After removing VM Workstation all was well again, very odd.  My guess is that because VM is running in the background as a service with the virtual networks that is installed causes it to be confused with Microsoft’s SMB.   I ended up creating an entire DFS test environment using production Active Directory servers, lot of time for something so small.  Oh well……..I’m okay that it’s just me and some test machines.   Anyone else see or hear of this?