Finder crash when searching server

We recently bought a bunch of new iMacs to replace our old machines and, in the process, inheirited all sorts of new troubles with the switch to 10.8. The one that's bugging me at the moment is what appears to be a ubiquitous problem among all of users using the new machines running 10.8.3

trying to access our server running 10.5.8.

Search any folder of the server > receive results > modify the search to be LESS specific > crash.

In other words, if I change my search term from "tests" to "test" the finder will crash.

To be even MORE specific, that would crash ONLY IF if the search for "tests" returned some results. If there were no results because I simply mistyped "testb" and then changed the search to "test" this would NOT cause a crash.

I have replicated this crash on every machine running 10.8 and have been unable to replicate it on older machines running 10.7.

This is appears to be a duplicate of another question that was not really answered.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4230958

The solution there seemed to be upgrading the server, which would imply that this is an incompatibility between a 10.8 client and a 10.5 server. Can anybody confirm that? Or offer a simpler solution than me messing with an otherwise healthy server?