I have a pretty straightforward setup where I'm storing media files on an XP pro machine, and sharing the folder to be accessed by other XP pro machines around the house. (Typically, there's only one client accessing the share at a time, although there may be several with the share mounted.) It's been working just fine for years, but I've recently started having some problems.

A couple of days ago, the host PC had power disconnected while it was running. It was restarted and everything seemed fine initially, but since then browsing the shared folder from client machines has been extremely slow and actually reading data is all but impossible. The problem exists in every access method I've tried: Windows Explorer, VLC dialogs, command line, etc.

My first thought was that the disk was experiencing problems, but there are no problems viewing the files locally on the host machine.

My second thought was that there was a network problem on the host machine, so I removed and reinstalled drivers for the NIC with no change.

My third thought was that there might've been a problem elsewhere on the network, so I swapped out hardware to no avail.

I'm regrouping and trying to come up with a methodical approach to figuring out what might be wrong. I would of course be thrilled if you can suggest specific problems (Microsoft KB articles, etc.) that I might check, but I'm not expecting a silver bullet. If you can help me outline an approach to identify the problem (including recommended tools, e.g., disk checkers, network analyzers, etc.) I'd greatly appreciate it.