Win7 very slow viewing contents of large network folders

I have some network folders with 1500, 3000, and 5000 files. It's very slow opening those folders just to see the files anywhere from 15-30 sec. I've read lots of google articles and even several from this forum. Many articles are several years old, so I'm not sure how relevent. I've customized the folders in Win 7 for general items and checked "also apply this template to subfolders". I went to power options and chose advanced and changed the setting "turn off HD after 20 min to 1200 min (20 hours). I've disabled sleep mode.

I have indexing off for all my HD's, because this is an audio recording computer and I try to stop as many Windows background tasks from operating in the background. If turning indexing back on will solve this problem, then I'd try it.

As soon as I boot up into Win7 and try to access those 3 network folders I get this long delay, yet if I try to access local win7 folders they open up right away and have 5000 files. So my problem is with the network. I have 2 XP network computers wired and the latest updated Win 7. Is there a solution?

Age old problem but with many possible solutions, many of those solutions are mentioned in the following link.

It could also be that updating the routers firmware or using a different router could fix the problem as is described in the link but there are quite a few other possible causes and solutions in the link.

Extremely slow file transfers and network access...

That link refers to slow file transfers, maybe it's related to my problem, but none of those suggestions help. I have a dual boot system (XP and win 7) XP works just fine, Win 7 is slow on viewing network folder contents. Are their links that refer to my problem?

Viewing contents to me also means that it relates to file transfer speeds because I really couldn't find much about slow file viewing but slow transfer problem are all over the place.

It probably has something to do with the number of files in that particular folder. About all you can do is try different things and hope for the best.