98SE and XP

[fred]

I have a network with a number of XP machines and a number of 98SE machines. All the XP machines talk just fine, but the 98SE machines have trouble talking to the XP machines. Comms often starts fast but after few seconds drops to painfully slow. Looking at the network monitor in Xp, the network is showing really poor transfer rates! All the connections are showing a data rate of 100mb but are transferring at about 1mb per minute! Or in other words 100kb/s not 100mb/s!!!
This happens on not one, BUT ALL of the 98SE machines! The XP machines are fine though and transfer at the normal rates you would expect.
Any ideas?

[DFastLane]

Is this to/from a mapped drive? I know that I had problems with win2k and win98 if I did't map the drive I was transferring to/from. It would crawl if I tried to access files directly through network neighborhood.