Hi stunix! Thanks for posting your issue and taking the time to explore the suggestions by the other forum members.
I spotted this thread last night when there was still only one reply. I see a lot more has transpired since then. Unfortunately, I don't have much insight on this particular issue, probably because I don't have much experience with network file mounting, including Samba.
Actually, basically zero experience in Linux, and a trivial amount of experience with network shares in Unix maybe 17 years ago.
Fluff uses the opendir() and readdir() POSIX API functions to scan the filesystem and list files. I don't know if these APIs have any particular limitations with network filesystems, but if so, then I think it will not be a simple fix. I'm not familiar enough with the other file managers that seem to work OK to know how they gather the directory structure and content, but perhaps they do it in a different way. Maybe I'll look around a bit in one or two other file managers for ideas. If they use a completely different method and it won't expand the executable much, maybe I'll consider adopting it, but it would likely take a while (weeks? months?), especially if it entails a lot of low-level recoding work.
I see you said "if you cant fix it, no big deal, ill use xfm." Short term at least, I think you will need to use another file manager. I made Fluff to be a much lighter-weight alternative to XFE, Rox Filer, Nautilus, and so on. I would like it to work on almost any file system, but to stay small, maybe some sacrifices must be made. But perhaps I just need to code smarter. Of course, I'll consider any source-code patches people send me.
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Mike Lockmoore