I've had this problem for ages and I'm sort of fed up with it so here goes: why is de SMB kio-slave so incredibly slow when listing things in Dolphin? It seems to be working fine under Konqueror.

I mean, file transfers are up to speed and once a folder is viewed once, its obviously cached because the next time I enter it, the contents is listed immediately.

I've disabled the info panel and still it is slow. And I mean 10 to 50 second slow.

While browsing the same folder from Windows 7, the listings show up instantly, so its not a server thing. Also, I've had it with pretty much every remote OS you can use SMB on so I'm fairly sure its my computer. And like I said, Konqueror using the smb:// prefix works dandy as well.

I've tested with smbclient from a console as well and while the initial contact takes a few seconds (although I'm not using authentication), once connected, listing contents is just as fast as its under Windows.

So why not in Dolphin?

Have you filed a bug report for this?

Not yet, I was hoping someone could point me to a solution rather than assuming its a KDE glitch which needs fixing

Can you reproduce under a new user?
Also, have you disabled thumbnails?

Yes and yes

I'm requesting the icon view (which should not render thumbnails I think) or one of the lists.

One last detail: do you have the information panel enabled?
If you don't, then please file a bug at bugs.kde.org.