High network usage over network filesystem

[Javier Tarifa <xavier.tarifa@adbosch.es>]

I have a weird problem. I'm using dosbox to access a mounted network 
partition. The problem is that every time a command or a program is 
launched, if your current working directory (of msdos, not linux) is in 
the novell partition, it takes forever to start. The weird thing was 
that the cpu was idle all the time, so I looked into it and saw that the 
network usage would skyrocket.
This happens specially when you're on a directories with lots of files 
in them, and I need to run a lot of commands in directories that have 
over 4000 files. This means that every time I try to launch something it 
will usually sit there for 5-6 seconds before doing anything, and that 
means that it's impossible to execute some bats we now execute under dos 
(they invoke  a program more than a thousand times).
Doing an strace, I can see it "hangs" after doing a getdents call, so I 
suppose that for some reason it's retrieving info of the files on the 
current directory or something.
Why it's doing that? Is it a dosemu thing or a freedos thing? Any idea 
how I can get around it?