At 11:09 PM 3/09/2003 +1000, you wrote:

>I can only imagine that this has something to do with the client machine's
>transport layers.
>Normally IP address will resolve faster than machine name

The IP address gets passed to the network pipe or layer as a string. If
the string can't be resolved to a <servername> parameter in the local HOSTS
file and DHCP can't identify it (or isn't running), only then does the
network layer break the string up and try it out as an IP address.

>BTW it's the
>client libaries doing the parsing here and asking the servername to connect
>to the path.

Kind of, but this statement is misleading. The client dll hangs on to the
path portion but it passes the host name (and port number, if present) to
the NOS. The IP resolution is done by the NOS, not the client dll. There
is no pipe until the NOS returns a valid response from the server back to
the client dll. The client doesn't parse anything otherwise - it's just a
transporter. It's the server that picks up the path and operates on the
database file.

Another common reason for slow connection on Windows is too much NOS noise
from NetBEUI interference. If you're connecting via TCP/IP, make sure that
TCP/IP is at the top of the protocol stack. Take NetBEUI out altogether if
it isn't being used. Every node on a NetBEUI network is touched by all
traffic from all nodes. Also, IPX/SX is installed by default on NT 4
Workstation - definitely remove it if it's there.

heLen