Network slow down on searching

[Milamber]

I work in an office with about 14 macs from beige g3's to brand new iMac's and all the systems now have OS 10.1.5 installed on them.

We have a B&W g3 running OS X Server. This is a network over ethernet with an airport jimmy-rigged on to it. The server has about 5 hard drives attached to it (firewire)


Now, something really odd happens - fairly often when someone searches on the server hard drive(s), a random number of computers will completely sieze up becoming useless till the search is done.

Now, it doesn't happen with every search, and it doesn't always happen to the same computers, or all the computers. I've done some looking and have absolutely no CLUE why this is happening - if any one has even the slightest incling as to what in the world is going on, please let me know.

Muchas gracias!