Weird error with AFP shares

Hi everyone,

I am using an OS X 10.8.5 Server with mostly 10.6.8 Clients. The clients usually open, save, copy to and from AFP shares provided by the server. Sometimes it happens that a client gets thrown out of a folder it is currently viewing on the AFP share. Once this behaviour starts it is near impossible to navigate down on the folder hierarchy since you get teleported back 1 to 3 levels. The number of levels depends on how fast you managed to drill down before you get thrown back. So an example would be:

The client views folder A on /Volumes/AFPShare/Stuff/Folder1

You start to navigate to a folder residing inside Folder1. If you now wait for a few seconds Finder will throw you out and back to Folder1. If you mangage to drill a few levels down really fast you might make it to /Volumes/AFPShare/Stuff/Folder1/data/more/here. But then you immediately are teleported back to /Volumes/AFPShare/Stuff/Folder1.

From this point it won’t ever work again until you unmount and remount the share. Sometimes even a reboot of the client is neccessary. It happens with ~10 clients so it is not just one isolated client acting weird. On the Server side I did not notice anything wrong or weird happening. There are no backups, syncs or other tasks running on the server while this occurs. It seems to happen more often when you are using list view (cmd+2), but I have already seen it with column view, too.

I’ve read about similar problems with SMB, but I am really stumped at where to look next. I already ruled out that it’s just with 1 client Mac. Deleting .DS_Store files did not help (not that I counted on that one).

Another weird thing in addition to that is that sometimes the Finder shows folders twice or even more often. These are exactly named the same. Sometimes they disappear when you want to click on one of them.

Any ideas anyone?

Thanks

Björn