windows file share slow

I've been using several versions of OS X - from 10.7 to 10.9. They all seem to handle sharing files with windows equally poorly.

Folders with 50+ files are extremely slow to load (5 min+) or never load at all. File transfer crash often.

Dragging the windows share icon on the mac desktop often crashes finder (I think this is because the location of the icon must be written to the ds_store file on the server, which is often very slow).


I have multiple macs and multiple windows servers. All combinations result in this. What's wrong?