Slow stat (was Startup speed: Still too many stats?)

I want to make it very clear that this is NOT an FSF NTEmacs vs NTXemacs issue. It's just that Microsoft's implementation of the stat system call is very slow. It's worse over a network. Microsoft's "dir" command and the Explorer don't do stat. They get less information, and use some other mechanism I don't understand. I have it on my list of things to do to make a version of dired that uses "dir" instead of "ls -l". When in Rome... Like I said, it has less information, but it's SO much faster! Has anyone already done it? I reconstructed my timing experiments. I have a directory that contains 5000 files, which I replicated on my local disk and on a file server (marshall, who is a router-hop away). NTEmacs has a lisp function that does a directory-files, then a file-attributes for each file. It's for people who don't have unix emulator tools. (I don't know if NTXemacs has it.) I used it for the dired timing test. For comparison, I did various "ls" commands in a DOS command prompt window. I'm using Cygnus' cygwin32 b19 ls.exe. I'm running NT 4.0 service pack 3. Command time dired d:/temp/big 30 sec ls -l //d/temp/big 18 seconds dir d:\temp\big 4 seconds Explorer d:\temp\big 2 seconds dired //marshall/homes/temp/big 15 MINUTES ls -l //marshall/homes/temp/big 13 MINUTES dir \\marshall\homes\temp\big 15 seconds Explorer \\marshall\homes\temp\big 11 seconds Larry