I know there are a number of threads on Win 7's slow network performance, but I think my experience might shed new light, and help us find an answer. FWIW, we are a software development company. ;-) Here's what I started with and how it all worked. 1 XP Pro Desktop 1 XP Pro Laptop 1 Vista Ultimate Desktop 1 7 Home Premium Laptop 1 FileMaker Hosted database Peer-to-peer network, hard-wired, single internet connection When I first got the Win 7 machine, it was finicky getting to see the other computers and shared drives. After awhile, I got it going. Have had VERY few problems. In fact, regardless of which machine I hosted the database on, connectivity was great, as was copying files, and even large amounts of data. The other day I added another Win 7 Home Premuim to the mix, and this one has SP1. While I had no problems getting this particular machine up on the network and seeing the other computers' drives, I have seen a disappointing network issue. When I host the database on this machine, MOST of the other machines have normal performance when accessing the database. When using Win 7 machine 1 to access the database, performance starts off fast, then tapers to a little less than a crawl, as if I was trying to access a host over a 2400baud dial-up connection, if that. When I make Win 7 machine 2 the host, again, all other machines have no problems, but this time Win 7 machine 1, as a client, experiences the dreadful performance problem. I believe that this is consistent with so many complaints about File copying performance, although I have not seen the copying problem, albeit I have no need to copy large amounts of data. I have tried all the changes I've read about in regards to Network Adapter settings, and such, and I have found that almost any change you make to the Network Adpater triggers and immediate improvement, like everything is fine, for about 3 minutes, which is why there are likely so many purported "fixes", because I changed many settings, one by one, and each time I thought I had it fixed, too, only to find that a few minutes later, the performance degraded again. For example, right after making a change, I reboot and then open the database on the hosting computer. I then open the client app, and everything opens fine. If I navigate around, everything is fine. If I then leave it open and try to navigate in the client a few minutes later, everything has crawled to almost a halt! This makes me wonder if it really is a TCP/IP Stack issue, more than anything else. Any thoughts would be appreciated.

I forgot to mention that when I host the database on an XP machine, or Vista machine, all clients, including the Win 7 computers have no performance issues whatsoever. So, this problem is ONLY between Windows 7 machines. That's too bad, because Windows 7 is supposed to be better than the the older OSes, but in this day and age of networks everywhere, Windows 7 is not a contender. I have seen reports of this since Windows 7 first came out, and would have thought that SP1 would have fixed this. Anyone have any luck with a fix, or workaround for this horrible network performance?

Hi, Let us configure NTLM authentication level for a test. 1. Click Start, type in Secpol.msc and press Enter. 2. Expand "Local Policies" and select "Security Options" 3. Locate "Network Security: LAN Manager Authentication Level" in the list and double-click it. 4. Change the setting from "Send NTLMv2 response only" to "Send LM & NTLM - use NTLMv2 session if negotiated" 5. Network Security: Minimum session security for NTLM SSP Based (including secure RPC) Clients 6. Change the setting from "require 128 bit" to unchecked (No Minimum) 7. Click OK, and exit.Kim Zhou TechNet Community Support

Looks like we solved the network access performance issue. Apparently Windows 7 has introduced multiple problems into network connectivity performance. The one we were originally most concerned with was program access, which has proven to be a completely separate issue than the file copying bugs. First the resolution to the performance problem: It appears that Windows 7 machines have an issue negotiating speeds when the network adapters' Speed & Duplex settings are set to "Auto...". Initally, we changed the cards to the highest matching speed, which is 1Gb. Again, things appeared fine for a few minutes, then performace degraded. We then stepped the speeds down to 100Mb, and the problem disappeared completely. Our network routers and cables are rated for 100Mb, so the only explanation for the initial improvement at 1Gb settings is that Windows 7 must override the adapters' hard settings in some way. But, once we set the cards to match the hardware speeds, we were golden. We decided to see what all the hype was on the file copying issue, and have discovered several odd things: Copying files to and from both Win 7 machines to other computers with different Windows OSes revealed no issues whatsover. Speeds of 11.2Mbps were constant. However, copying between networked Windows 7 computers revealed more than one problem. First, we went to Win 7 machine 1 to copy (push) data to Win 7 machine 2 (with SP1 on it), which initially resulted in 1Mbps transfers. We tested with a 63Mb file over many passes. We then tested the changing of each and every Network Adapter setting, and in combination with others which, as you might expect, took many, MANY hours. In the end, the tweaking of multiple "offload" Network Adapter settings was what finally enabled us to hit the 4Mbps transfers. Not great, but better than the initial 1Mbps. Specifically, we disabled all settings that had "offload" in their names, with the exception of TCP Checksum Offload (IP4), and UDP Checksum Offload (IP4), which both surprisingly need to be set to"TX Enabled" to achieve the 4Mbps transfers. We performed the 2nd test by going to Win 7 machine 2 (with SP1) and pushing data to Win 7 machine 1. This gave us speeds between 200kbps and 800kbps. Yes, you read right. Same file, too. Similar adjustments to the "offload" settings only got us as high as 1Mbps, but only for bursts, and with many stalls and failures. We tried changing the receive settings on Machine 1's Network Adapter, all to no avail. We then went back to machine 1 and tested pulling the file from machine 2's hd, and were surprised to see that pulling the file resulted in the same low speeds that machine 2 displayed when pushing. We went bacl to machine 2 to see what would happen if we tried pulling the file from machine 1. This resulted in peaks of 2Mbps, roughly half of the speed when the file was pushed from machine 1 to machine 2. We cannot figure out why machine 2 is so much slower when pushing data, and when data is being pulled from it. Could it be that we have Win 7 SP1 on the machine? This is a brand-new machine, so there is no way to install plain ol' Win 7. In fact, we read somewhere that someone said they saw this problem only after installing SP1, but we have no way to test that. The other thing is that on the SP1 machine, we did all the Windows updates after taking it out of the box, when we have a rule NEVER to update because in our experience updates nearly ALWAYS cause problems. Our next step is to revert back to the factory setup to see if the Windows Updates were indeed the issue. Wish us luck!

Thanks for the reply. Before applying your suggestion, I decided to look on the NIC card manufacturers' websites with the remote possibilty that there were newer drivers for the machines in question. Although one of the machines is brand new, I thought there was a slim chance that they would have a newer driver. Lo and behold, both NIC card manufacturers had newer drivers that Windows Update wasn't even aware of. I installed them on both the machines and the problem was resolved. Moral of the story is that you really can't trust that manufacturers test properly before releasing products that are supposedly compliant with the OS they purport them to be. And, in this case it was not a Microsoft issue at all. ;-) How these manufacturers ended up as OEMs for Sony and Lenovo puzzles me.

Hi, Let us configure NTLM authentication level for a test. 1. Click Start, type in Secpol.msc and press Enter. 2. Expand "Local Policies" and select "Security Options" 3. Locate "Network Security: LAN Manager Authentication Level" in the list and double-click it. 4. Change the setting from "Send NTLMv2 response only" to "Send LM & NTLM - use NTLMv2 session if negotiated" 5. Network Security: Minimum session security for NTLM SSP Based (including secure RPC) Clients 6. Change the setting from "require 128 bit" to unchecked (No Minimum) 7. Click OK, and exit.Kim Zhou TechNet Community Support

Thanks for the reply. Before applying your suggestion, I decided to look on the NIC card manufacturers' websites with the remote possibilty that there were newer drivers for the machines in question. Although one of the machines is brand new, I thought there was a slim chance that they would have a newer driver. Lo and behold, both NIC card manufacturers had newer drivers that Windows Update wasn't even aware of. I installed them on both the machines and the problem was resolved. Moral of the story is that you really can't trust that manufacturers test properly before releasing products that are supposedly compliant with the OS they purport them to be. And, in this case it was not a Microsoft issue at all. ;-) How these manufacturers ended up as OEMs for Sony and Lenovo puzzles me.