DFS Referral problem

Hi,

I'm using DFS on a Win2k3 R2 domain. We recently set up a new office. I set
this up as a new site in active directory. The new office only has WAN links
to our head office so I set up a site link between the new office and head
office. I have 2 other remote sites that have WAN links to the head office as
well as to each other

The problem is that browsing dfs shares in the new office occasionally (once
every 5 mins or so) hangs the client computers. Sometimes these hangs can
last for well over a minute.

Troubleshooting the problem led me to using ‘nbtstat –c‘ to view the local
name cache, at which point I discovered that browsing the shares would cause
the clients to open connections to dfs shares in other offices. I think that
this could be the cause of our problem as the site only has WAN links to the
head office so it can’t actually talk to computers in any of our other
offices so if it tries it’s going to fail. But the strange thing is that if I
use dfsutil to view the dfs referral information for the client it is always
getting referred to the correct server in the local site so why is the
computer opening connections to other servers?

I’ve got all the latest patches for the servers, and I’ve been over and over
every detail of the DFS config and I just can’t find any reason for this
behaviour. I have even tried using the ‘exclude targets outside of the
client’s site option’ in DFS.....but the delays still continue, and nbtstat
still reports connections to remote servers, even though dfsutil now only
shows referrals within the site. It’s almost as if the clients sometimes
decide to take a wander through all the dfs shares before settling on the
right one.

I have, however noticed that, according to nbtstat, clients in my other
sites also open connections to remote servers when browsing a dfs share, so
maybe this is expected behaviour? Users in the other sites don’t experience
the hangs that the new site does though.

Can anyone offer any advice please?

Thanks