VPN to network drive slows down Adobe programs?

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Please bear with me, as this is a long description... I'm running a G5 PPC with OSX 10.4.11 and all my Adobe software is CS3. (Also, apologies if this is in the wrong section, since it seems to cover networking, programs, and general OSX.)

I recently began working remotely for my company, hooking up to our network server via VPN, to access our creative files. I'm not sure of the technical terms but the server is divided into three separate drives– one for our creative files, one for marketing files, and one for random storage. So I connect with VPN and then hook up to whichever of the three drives I need. VPNing itself works fine, no speed issues, and connecting to two of the three drives (that don't have a ton of data on them) also works fine. But when I connect to the creative drive (about 600 GBs worth of data), workflow slows down to a crawl.

As a quick example... A very small .psd file on my desktop (about 200 kb) normally takes 2 seconds to open in Photoshop, whether I'm disconnected completely or *just* have the VPN up. If, however, I take it a step further and hook up to the creative drive through VPN, suddenly it takes Photoshop almost 2 minutes to open that same desktop file. Trying to work with files actually on the drive (opening, moving, saving, etc.) is tortorously slow to the point that the beachball comes up with just about any activity within any program.

I have the same issues with Photoshop, Illustrator, and Indesign (all CS3). I've been trying to work with my IT company to narrow down why this is happening, and they suggested the Adobe programs themselves might be causing the problem– perhaps they're trying to index the files on the creative drive, or something along those lines? I did the same "open a file" test with Microsoft Word while connected to the creative drive and not, and it didn't experience any slowdown at all. So I think they may be on to something but I have no idea what to do about it.

So, in a nutshell: the programs work fine when I'm just connected via VPN, but hooking into the large drive then turns everything into molasses.

If there are maybe folks who also VPN and might've had to deal with this problem, any help to figure out why I'm experiencing such slowdown would be tremendous.

Thanks!
m19
 

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